“If she’s a queen, I’m a sack of anthracite biscuits,” snorted Rosinathorn.
“If she’s a queen, I’m a hornet with a head cold,” said Rosadolorosa.
Ignoring the rabble, Rosa Rugosa said loftily to Ada, “I suppose you could call me a princess. The royalty of beauty. While you . . . well, you aren’t beautiful at all. Indeed, you’re not like any child I’ve ever seen before.”
“Have you seen many little girls?”
“Never a one.”
“Then I couldn’t be like her. There’s no one to be like.”
“And indeed you aren’t. Couldn’t be more different if you tried.”
Ada tried again. “Have you noticed someone named Alice come along?”
“Let me think,” said Rosa Rugosa. “No. Rosinathorn, Rosadolorosa, have you seen an Alice?”
Perhaps they didn’t know what an Alice was. Rosinathorn and Rosadolorosa refused to reply.
Ada hurried on. “It’s just that—well, if she’s here, I seem to have lost her.”
“Perhaps she has lost you,” said Rosa Rugosa. “You aren’t much in the way of sparkling companionship so far. You’re new here, aren’t you?”
“I’m sorry that I’ve intruded,” said Ada. “I’ll just ask that gardener coming along the strand.”
“Gardener?” shrieked Rosa Rugosa. She began to furl her petals. A creature was making his way toward them at a great speed. He was shaped something like a sail, but bothered by a wind that turned him sideways and showed him to be paper-thin. As he drew closer, Ada could see that he was a playing card about her own height. Which meant either he was a large card or she’d become a very little girl. The Ace of Spades, he seemed, on spindly legs. In one hand he carried a flower basket made of wicker, and in the other a spade.
“They will choose to live on the outskirts of respectable society, this lot,” he huffed as he drew nearer. “Stand aside, child, or you’ll be flecked with sand as I dig. I assume you want to keep your frock tidy for the afternoon affair.”
“What are you doing?” asked Ada.
“She calls for roses, and roses she must have,” said the Ace of Spades. Strong for a paper creature, he set to work in the sandy soil near the roots of Rosa Rugosa.
“I am being abducted!” shrieked the princess (if indeed she was one, and not just putting on airs). “Rosinathorn, to arms!”
Rosinathorn smirked as she retracted her jagged backbone.
Ada asked the gardener, “Who calls for roses?”
“The Queen.”
“Queen Victoria?”
“Whosoever that is, she has no standing here. I’m talking about the Queen of Hearts, don’t you know,” said the Ace of Spades. “We ran low in our count of roses, and I am dispatched to swell the population.”
“This is rape, this is plunder,” shrilled Rosa Rugosa. “Rosinathorn, ready your thorns! Rosadolorosa, strangle this miscreant with your creepers!”
Rosinathorn and Rosadolorosa attempted nothing of the sort, but remained as still and mute as an arrangement upon a tombstone.
The Ace of Spades began to cantilever Rosa Rugosa’s root system upon the spade. A fringe of airy brown threads came to light with a scatter of soil.
“Down below, she’s dirty as the rest of us,” sniggered Rosinathorn under her breath.
“Come to stay, have you?” the Ace of Spaces asked of Ada.
Ada hadn’t yet considered the duration of her visit to this peculiar place. The question made her uneasy. “I couldn’t say,” she replied. “I started out by looking for a friend.”
“You’ll find no friend here,” said the Ace of Spades. “These are a heartless lot, roses. Very selfish. I’d suggest you try the royal family, the Hearts. But they’re worse.”
“Replant me at once or I’ll tell the Queen you said that!” said Rosa Rugosa.
“You shut your gob or I’ll paint you white,” said the Ace of Spades. Rosa Rugosa obeyed, or perhaps she had fainted. The gardener threw the uprooted princess into his wicker carryall. “Any other volunteers?” The mean-spirited companions were shocked into silence. Rosinathorn shed all her thorns; they dropped to the ground around her. Rosadolorosa went from white to grey. She appeared to have died of grief, instantly. Before Ada could ask if she might join the Ace of Spades, he was hurrying around the promontory in the direction from which she’d come.
CHAPTER 12
She left Rosinathorn and Rosadolorosa. There was nothing she could do for them. If they revive, let them learn to comfort one another with the language of flowers, she thought. Passion and Annihilation in the absence of Happiness. I have Alice to find.
She followed the Ace of Spades. She was just in time to see him arrive at the door in the sand. He located a key tied to a cord that looped through the handle of his wicker basket. He unlocked the door on the OUT KEEP side and went through, slamming it shut behind him. Ada had been calling to him, calling as in a dream, but her voice was small and lost in the wind. By the time she got to the door, it was locked again. When she walked around the door, the Ace of Spades and Rosa Rugosa were nowhere in sight.
She looked out to the horizon, puzzling. The sea was shrinking. The world on the other side of the ocean became visible. She’d always wondered where Noah’s flood went when it was done. Now she knew. Underground.
This sea was gurgling with a murky slurp, as if draining into a section of the new London sewers. Everyone said they were such a miracle, those sewers, relegating the Great London Stink to history. Ada didn’t know about that, but she was familiar with an ebb tide at the Isle of Wight. She expected a pungency of fish rot. She smelled only opodeldoc. The blur of the incoming world was a wave of forest, green heads of elm and oak a sort of leafy spume. I shall be crushed by a marauding wood, she thought. This did not terrify her. Something outlandish would be on the other side of that experience, another OUT KEEP, no doubt.
Still, she made herself rigid in case the force of the green tide broke all her bones. She didn’t want her limbs to be scattered so far apart as to make reassembly difficult. She understood that personal integrity was a matter of finding the proper cage; she’d been broken before, yet her iron corset had kept her contained.
The crowns of the trees reared back on all sides like the heads of stallions at dressage. The limbs of onrushing trees linked arms. The sea had become the size of a puddle and it was still shrinking. Ada peered, hoping that if it disappeared completely she’d be able to spy the drain. What could be under the underworld? But when there was hardly more than a cupful of salt water left in the sand, it resolved itself into the bowl of a teacup set upon a saucer. Tied to the porcelain handle was a tag. Words were written upon it.
Ada groaned at the effort of bending, but the groan was only habit; bending hardly hurt at all. Before she could lift the cup and saucer from the sand, however, a breeze blew the sand away, revealing a shiny disk. This turned into the glass top of a rosewood table that thrust itself out of a wooden floor much as a fountain rises when the spigots are first opened. The table grew to the height of a pergola, elevating the teacup far out of Ada’s reach. In the shade of the closing forest, only a cup of ocean, and it was over her head.
I ought to be able to see what the tag says, even if it just says NO BATHING FOR THREE HOURS AFTER LUNCHEON, thought Ada. Try as she might, she couldn’t climb the pedestal of the table high enough to read the tag through the glass. She looked about to find some fallen tree limb that she might prop against the tabletop and thereby scale the slope to the glass plateau. Only now did she realize that, though the approaching forests had halted in time to keep from crushing her, they’d come dreadfully close. They’d boxed her into a sort of capacious coffin. And the forest was turning itself inside out. It assumed the look of an attractive beveled paneling that lined four sides of a windowless salon. She could find only one door in this long, hi
gh chamber, the previously isolated door that said KEEP OUT. It was now properly fitted into a wall. Snug, and no doubt still locked.
Overhead, what Ada had thought were intertwining boughs turned out to be a pale green ceiling, done over in a plaster molding that emulated the fan-vaulting in Brasenose College Chapel. The effect was faintly pietistic. In the center of the ceiling, the branches twisted themselves into another instruction: DON’T LOOK UP.
CHAPTER 13
There is no earthly reason why I ought to stay here for the benefit of that Miss Armstrong, thought Lydia. If Ada falls into mischief through lack of supervision, her governess will be shown the door. Then that poor woman’s struggles over her feelings for the Vicar will be a matter of the past. In any event, it isn’t my duty to play watchguard for Ada Boyce. I’m nobody’s servant.
So with a determination to be brusque and to enjoy it, she rose to her feet and turned back toward her own home.
The day was continuing warm, indeed warm enough that showers might follow by tea-time. A certain broodiness of cumulus out toward the Cotswolds as Lydia picked her way along the path. She avoided the eyes of strolling summer scholars and Saturday marketgoers, hustling by with their baskets and barrows, as assiduously as they attempted to catch hers.
Pater had said to keep out from underfoot until the guests left. She expected he had meant to say, “Keep Alice away, as she will only ask vexing questions.” Lydia wasn’t certain, but in any case, she was hardly dragging Alice back before tea-time. Lydia would slip in through the kitchen garden and disturb no one. If Alice had already come home and was interrupting affairs, Lydia could claim to have become lost with Theseus and Hippolyta in the forests around Athens. Pater would allow that much.
She made her way past the rangy yews and into the kitchen garden. Upon the margins of the grounds surrounding the house, newer neighborhoods were encroaching—the elegant terrace houses in the crescents of Park Town were almost visible through the distant phalanx of trees. But, dating from some previous century, the Croft lingered on, lacking style and symmetry. An undistinguished stone farmhouse with halfhearted stucco chipped away in patchwork pieces to reveal glimpses of a frame timber construction, oak beams filled in with a crazy quilt of brick, rubble, stone. The house seemed to list in the sunlight. An effect of irregular eaves, perhaps. The back door was open. Hens were wandering about like ladies at a lyceum tea trying to find their friends before selecting their seats. The dovecote was silent. The heat made doves dozy.
Mrs. Brummidge was slapping dough on the pastry table. Great whuffs of flour paled the air. The room reeked of stewed celery and onion broth. “Thought you was Carter with that brace of hares, I did,” said the cook, wiping straying hairs away from her brow with the front of her wrist. “But it’s the likes of Miss Lydia inspecting the kitchens, no less.” Her tone was less mocking than it may sound. She was, perhaps, a bit intimidated by the young mistress of the house. “Where’s Alice at, then?”
“Isn’t Alice at home?”
“If she’s not with you, she’s missing again. I worried as much to your father this morning, but then I decided she’d gone with you.”
“I expect she’s wandered back. Must be loitering somewhere.”
“Miss Lydia, I made a jam pasty and left it steaming on the sill; that always draws Alice for a nibble if she’s haunting a place. But she’s not come around, I notice. Mayhaps the child has taken Dinah and her kittens up the back stairs to the nursery? My back has been turned what with a luncheon for guests to manage, so nothing is impossible. Nip up them steps and have a look-see. If she’s not crooning to the kittens, I’d say she’s still out and about.”
Lydia gripped an unpainted chair and sat down. “If she’s home, we’ll hear her in good time. How are things in the parlor?”
Mrs. Brummidge gave Lydia a look the girl could not read, waited a moment before continuing. “You’d have to ask Rhoda. She’s been doing the coming and going.”
Rhoda sat in the corner unthreading the runner beans. “Lot of talky-talk in there, they had to open the windows to let the words out,” she said.
“How is the mighty Darwin? Is this part of a delayed victory lap?” The Great Oxford Debate several years ago, in which Darwin’s theories had been attacked by Bishop Wilberforce (and defended by the family’s distant cousin Thomas Huxley, among others), was by now old news but still fun. Even bootblacks, disagreeing about the proper practice of their trades, threatened to rent out the Oxford University Museum of Natural History to argue their positions. Still, those who regarded the book of Genesis as factual took the notion of transmutation from beast to mankind very seriously indeed. Sedition, calumny, apostasy. There were some who said Darwin would be ill-advised to wander in dark Oxford lanes without a cosh and a pistol or, barring that, an agreeable gorilla to defend him against attacks from the spiritual thinkers of the day.
“I try not to overhear when I am retrieving the tray,” replied Rhoda, full of self-admiration, as if listening to Darwin hypothesize on pre-history might irritate her morals. “He has added inches and fullness to his beard since his last visit. I’ll say no more.”
“Perhaps he means to serve as a walking exhibit of Early Man before Tonsorial Parlors.” Lydia had her hands full with her own talents, appetites, delusions, and curiosities about life as it was lived in high June of 186_. Pre-history to a fifteen-year-old girl child means nothing further back in time than the courtship of her parents. “I don’t suppose Alice is in there with them? Rhoda?”
“No; just the master, and Darwin, and an associate visiting from Philadelphia or Boston, I believe, and his little black beetle.”
“Another specimen to examine? Is it pricked into a page with pins?”
“We don’t gossip in my kitchen,” snorted Mrs. Brummidge. Rhoda bent ostentatiously to her work. Lydia, included in the condemnation, felt chafed under instruction. She was imagining a campaign of insurrection, though had not settled on a strategy, when a knock sounded on the door from the passage.
“Goodness, could they not ring when they need attention?” hissed Mrs. Brummidge. “And me not done up proper to conduct a tour through the operations.” She adjusted her apron. She wiped some apple peels from where they’d clung to the cloth. She added, “The master is bringing Darwin through to examine lower life-forms, Rhoda. Straighten your spine or you’ll be mistook for a mollusk.”
“Maybe it’s Alice’s nurse, back early,” said Lydia.
“Miss Groader has gone to Banbury to deal with her ailing mother. She won’t return until the morrow. That’s why you were to be looking after Alice.” Arriving at the door to the passage, Mrs. Brummidge opened it with a brusque gesture, part genuflection and part defensive crouch.
It was neither beardy Darwin nor the master, after all, but a younger gentleman in fine enough clothes to make both Rhoda and Lydia sit up. “Ah, I’ve come to the right place,” he said. “Always an exercise in temptations, which closed door to approach.” He spoke in one of the American accents; Lydia couldn’t distinguish among them. To her they all sounded dry and tinny. Almost quack-like.
“What can I do for you sir.” Mrs. Brummidge was immune to the charms of a well-fitting waistcoat upon a trim male form if the form was a foreigner. The visitor had removed his coat, as the parlor took the morning sun punishingly. In his shirt-sleeves and buttoned vest he seemed the very grocer.
“I wondered if you might have some milk.”
Lydia stood and folded her hands together so the full impact of her juliette sleeves might register. “I’m Lydia. The mistress of the house, more or less.”
“I beg your pardon.” He bowed and blushed. “I’d been told you would not be at home today, and I assumed—how foolish of—” He all but swallowed his collar. “Mr. Winter, at your service.”
So now, an impasse. No further conversation was possible. Lydia
despite her status in the household was no more than a hostage standing in the center of this flour-strewn flagstone floor. This was Mrs. Brummidge’s domain.
The cook sniffed. “We don’t hold with milk drinking in this house unless there is a sick child. Too many vile particules. I could supply you with a glass of nut ale. Or a barley water. Take your choice. Unless the child is sick?”
“Child?” said Lydia. Affecting too maternal a tone would be a strain, and unconvincing; she tried merely for the investigative.
“Barley water would do nicely. Miss Lydia,” said Mr. Winter, and bowed. “Cook.” He glanced over at Rhoda and gave up, and disappeared.
“Child?” said Lydia, turning to Mrs. Brummidge with lifted nostrils, suggesting outrage at not having been informed. But of course: Hadn’t Miss Armstrong mentioned another young scalawag on the premises today?
“You do such a job keeping track of Alice,” retorted Mrs. Brummidge. “How mortifying, was you to lose a visiting child in the bargain. And one traveling with His Noxiousness Mr. Darwin, no less.” (Mrs. Brummidge did not care to imagine chimpanzees swinging from the branches of her family tree.)
“I’ll take the lemon barley through when it is ready,” said Lydia.
“I wouldn’t hear of it. A scandal. Rhoda, off your rump and look smart.” Though the Mrs. was an honorific, Mrs. Brummidge maintained a matron’s sense of decorum. She enjoyed wielding it as a weapon. It was more effective than irony.
CHAPTER 14
Ada sat and leaned against the pedestal of the table. To judge by the solitary piece of furniture, she seemed to be in a hall for giants. Yet she could spy no entrance for them. The KEEP OUT door in the baseboard looked like one from a writing-desk cubby. Ada felt very small indeed. But agile, like a mouse, not like a broken toy lost under the settee. Surely she could worry her way through that door somehow? It seemed to be the only exit.