After Alice

  “That sounds rather extreme.”

  “She never earned high marks for civility, I’m afraid. She’s ruthless, though great fun at a beheading. Now, for whom did you say you were looking?”

  Ada kept nearly forgetting. “Alice, a little girl. Like me. I believe she came this way, or nearby. Have you seen her?”

  “I have never seen a little girl. I wouldn’t recognize one if she stepped on me.”

  “I’m a little girl,” she replied.

  “If you’re a little girl, I’ll be a monkey’s aunt.” He took off a thick leathern glove and fished about in his breastplate. He withdrew a magnifying glass on a chain, which he put to his eye. A glaucous eye, and runny. “Well, timber my shivers, what an odd element you are,” he said. “A most unconvincing-­looking gentleman to stride the meadows. But then, the code of manliness requires us not to make comments on the intolerable ugliness of others. So I shall say no more about your condition, sir. But I do hope you manage to find some professional help. The bow in your hair is lopsided. Shall I?”

  “I’ll manage,” said Ada. “I could never fix it myself before this, for my arms would not go all the way up and around. I too wore an iron armature, you see. Not unlike yours, though more private. I seem to have lost it.”

  “I would lose my own suit of armor, though the Brigade to Preserve Morals in the Wilderness would probably have something to say about my choice of drawers. I favor an India-­printed pattern of capering codfish. Are you going as far as the Queen’s garden?”

  Ada said, “I never know where anything begins and ends here. So I don’t know quite where I am going. But I am looking for Alice.”

  “So you said. Well, if I should come across another gentleman kitted out as nonconformistly as you are, I shall ask if he is Alice. If he answers ‘Yes,’ he may be lying, so I shall pay no attention. If he answers ‘No,’ he may also be lying, so I shall send him directly to you with my compliments. What address shall I use?”

  “I have no address,” she said. “So I may as well continue along with you. Perhaps we shall find her together.”

  “You have no chattel, no impedimenta,” observed the White Knight. “I presume you have come to stay?”

  She didn’t know the answer. She’d embarked upon her unexpected journey without luggage of any variety, if one discounted the pot of marmalade. She felt only distant associations with the world of her dropsical mother and her father the Vicar, of Boykin Boyce the Screaming Wonder of the Nursery, and of Miss Armstrong Headstrong. Yet mentioning Alice to the old Knight made her friend come alive in Ada’s thoughts, much as the unexpected whiff of balsam sap can revive all manner of Yuletide memories and hopes.

  It occurred to Ada that Alice might be having a more difficult time of it in this peculiar wilderness than she was herself. She began to draw a distinction between them.

  Ada had only one friend, and that was Alice. The Croft, where Alice’s family lived, was near enough the Bickerage that Ada, chaperoned, could walk there by the river path, avoiding the crowds of Carfax or the High in Oxford proper. It was an untroubled route. In the center of town, Ada was too likely to be jostled by hurrying dons or by housemaids with paper packets of suet tied with string. Or she might be stared at, which was another sort of annoyance.

  Calm Alice never stared balefully at Ada, but talked and played in her own lively way. She included Ada when Ada turned up at the gate, but she ran off to follow a calf or a honeybee if it sang out to her, forgetting to bid Ada “Good-­bye!” or to say “I’ll return presently!” If Ada lived in portable iron stocks, Alice lived in the portable moment. They were well suited to be friends with each other. But if less constrained by the world than Ada was, Alice was also less tethered. Up until now.

  Ada had been relieved of her exoskeleton. She was walking about with the freedom—­well, the freedom of a young gentleman, actually. Perhaps that is what the old Knight was seeing in her, a jolly liberty, a certain being at-­large. Whereas Alice, who knew? Through this unreliable landscape Alice might herself still be moving. Blundering, with no sense of direction, no recollection of her origins. It is what made Alice amazing, and also why she tended to get lost. She needed Ada, even if she didn’t know it. It was Ada who would bring her home, if it could be managed.

  “This wood is becoming insistent,” said the Knight. He took out his sword and tried to prise a space between the tree trunks. They were growing closer together. On all sides the gloom thickened. The voluted bark pressed in. The forest seemed more like a paneled chamber than a dense glade. As the Knight drew his sword back, breathing heavily, he knocked over a glass-­topped table. A teacup fell and shattered on the marble floor, which was tiled like a chessboard in alternating squares of black and white. “I say, sir,” he said to Ada, “is that a keyhole I spy in yon chestnut bole? If so, would that key on the chain around your manly neck insert itself usefully therein?”

  CHAPTER 21

  The sun dispensed the sort of heat that presses against the skin and makes it itch. Lydia allowed her shawl to fall to her elbows. She was sorry she had brought it, but she had to have something to fiddle with. Her hands rarely knew how to keep still.

  They had reached the banks of the Cherwell. A skirting of plummy black shadow was dropped below each exhausted riverbank tree. A few cows were standing hock-­deep in the shallows, perhaps mesmerized by their reflections. Siam was flying at the water’s edge and beginning to splash, as if he were in Brighton. Noon bells sang out with their usual ignorance of mood, marking out moments of grief and worry, elation and confusion. The bells said that at its core, human life was fundamentally a sort of organic clockwork, while the winds and skylarks that swept against the sound of metronomic iron timekeeping argued for variety, subtlety, epiphany. What the sun thought, or meant, or said, was too high overhead to be heard. Like the vasty deity to which Lydia’s father tried to pray, the sun shouted its light and simultaneously kept its magnificent silence.

  What might her mother have made of Mr. Winter? It was a question that Lydia could neither answer nor let go. Against her reservations she forced herself to think in the funereal subjunctive. How would Mama have proceeded to chat with this unexpected American visitor?

  Mrs. Clowd might not have waited for Pater to introduce the guest. Mrs. Clowd would have exchanged pleasantries at the outset. She’d have spoken with a lively good humor, at once teasing and tender, asking droll questions that could summon no sensible reply. Mrs. Clowd would have embarrassed her husband, who would have been happy to be embarrassed. Mrs. Clowd dashed a room with fancy. Mrs. Clowd was dead. What lesson here for Lydia?

  Josiah Winter seemed satisfied to stroll in silence. He clasped his hands behind his back. Lydia didn’t have her mother’s bravado. As she understood the protocol, Lydia must wait until Mr. Winter felt ready to speak again. She couldn’t imagine how she might bring herself to address him first. She pictured, mostly in fun, how she might stumble so he would have to reach out a steadying hand. Though he was an American, surely he would be at least that gallant?

  “As we weren’t presented to each other formally,” said Mr. Winter at last, “I haven’t had the occasion to express my condolences on the loss of your mother.”

  She was so relieved he’d spoken at last that she had to clutch her stomach muscles with her hands. Oh, we never lost her; we know precisely the plot of ground in which her casket was laid. To keep from saying that, she began to giggle. But humor is anarchic. She snorted. Her nose blew out and her eyes ran. Losing your mother. Wasn’t that exactly what Pater wanted and needed, to revoke that loss, to correct that error of misplacing someone for eternity? And Pater required the reassurance of Darwin himself, of all ­people. Pater required some declaration of persisting faith, so that as Jane Isabel Clowd, late of this parish and removed to Iffley Churchyard, drew further away in time and in memory from her husband and daughters, the chances of her salvation an
d of the resurrection of her soul should not be equally adrift.

  For time had changed its terms, no matter what the bells of Oxford said. The one-­sided eternity of the afterlife, only a few years after the Oxford Debate, was now guessed to have a secret twin, a mirrored flank, beginning, if eternities could begin, as long a time before a life as the Scriptures proposed it would continue after.

  “Oh, Miss Lydia,” said Mr. Winter. He pulled from a waistcoat pocket a clean kerchief. “I have upset you, when I meant only to console you.”

  “It is the silly pollen,” she cried. She accepted his attentions and wiped her eyes. “The great Darwin himself cannot cozen my father back into his faith. The lock has sprung and it will not hitch again.”

  “Your father is a brave man. He seems to be an honest one. I mean honest in his mind,” he continued. “I mean in his thinking. I am not saying this at all well.”

  “Pater says it ought not make a difference if man’s place in nature, as Mr. Darwin recently insists, has a different origin than we understood before. Do you know what I mean?”

  “I have heard Mr. Darwin use the phrase ‘the descent of man,’ ” remarked Josiah Winter.

  She frowned. “Some days I do not know how much farther down we could go.”

  “Those are dark words for a young lady as pretty as you. Darwin doesn’t mean those words in a spiritual or moral sense, but only in terms of our history as primates. You are descended from your parents. It is that use of the word he means to imply.”

  “If we concede a different past, must we conclude a different future?” protested Lydia.

  “That’s your father’s question. I see that. And made intense by the loss of his wife, whom I wish I had had the fortune to meet. But you must not take upon yourself your father’s struggle. Remember your own English hymn, so popular in my country and, I believe, sung at the funeral of your Prince Albert. ‘Rock of Ages.’ It has the most encouraging conclusion.”

  The stranger then began to sing, right out in the open air.

  “While I draw this fleeting breath,

  When mine eyes shall close in death,

  When I soar to worlds unknown,

  See Thee on Thy judgment throne,

  Rock of Ages, cleft for me,

  Let me hide myself in Thee.”

  Lydia hardly knew what to say. She supposed she had asked for this. Soaring to worlds unknown sounded like an ascent, but becoming a plug in the Rock of Ages was surely not a celestial event, but a granitic one, the sepulchral descent of man.

  She didn’t know if she should return his handkerchief, damp as it was. But he might think she was clinging to it as a souvenir. Perhaps she would do just that. “He’s getting a good deal ahead,” she managed, pointing at Siam.

  “I will not lose him. I am all he has.”

  “He is lucky, I suppose.”

  “I do not think often about luck, except the quirk of accident that brought his soul into the world as a Negro in Georgia, and mine as a white man in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts.”

  “I should have imagined that was no accident.” Lydia attempted a sweetness that was, perhaps, not entirely successful. “Don’t you think, rather, the Almighty decides, at His sacred whim, which of us shall ascend and which descend? Shan’t we pay homage to His mastery by enduring the circumstances of our lives?”

  He didn’t speak for a while. He smiled at her sideways, quizzically. Then he said, “I see you are your father’s daughter, possessed of a quick mind. What a pity that, with all these great chapels of learning tottering about on every side of you, you will not have a chance to argue with some dean of divinity.”

  “We must conclude that my gender is another decision of the Almighty,” she said. Her tone was more muted. “I don’t discuss such matters with my father, though I listen when he speaks. Upon occasion, Pater tutors local grammar school boys hoping to sit the exams. He is especially interested in biblical history.”

  “I’m surprised he doesn’t teach at one of the colleges.”

  “We’re not all equally gifted,” was all she would say. “He enjoys his work in the archives of the Bodleian. He absorbs whatever he can by glancing at the volumes he locates for the scholars, who require them for their study.”

  “An education in scraps and moments.”

  “All that is afforded most of us. Did you attend a college, Mr. Winter?”

  Before he could answer, a fluting voice hailed Lydia from across the rich meadow. Miss Armstrong was bowling along, carrying a parasol to protect her noble nose from the sunlight. “Oh, Miss Lydia, how glad I am to see you again,” she cried. “I must confer with you, if you can spare me the time.”

  The governess descended upon them, huffing. “The descent of woman,” muttered Lydia. She was certain that Mr. Winter had not heard her.

  CHAPTER 22

  The key that the rattled Hare had given Ada: Would it fit in the door? It would. Would it swivel in the lock? Indeed it would, with a self-­satisfied and industrious little click.

  But then, would the door open?

  This was a different matter. Though the key had turned, the brass doorknob would not. Ada looked at the words engraved on its shiny surface. They were even smaller than before. She had to kneel and put her face close to the doorknob to try to make them out.

  “I left my spectacles on the mantelpiece, little man. What does it say?” asked the White Knight.

  “I think it says ALL YE WHO ENTER HERE, ABANDON HOPE,” replied Ada, “though I can’t be sure. The letters are very small and imprecise.”

  “I suspect its advice is to abandon home,” said the Knight. “As it turns out, I left home this morning. I refused to bring it along however much it whined. I believe I am qualified for admittance. Step away, let me try the door.”

  “It was my key,” said Ada, perhaps sullenly.

  “Ah, but you have not abandoned quite enough home,” said the White Knight. “You are a very young gentleman. Some habits are hard to shake off until you are old and frail like me. I have shaken off romance, ambition, and curly locks along with the accoutrements of the domestic life. I will not be denied. Aside, I say.”

  She moved aside. The White Knight took off his glove. He tried the doorknob. It would not turn. He tried to push the door in with his shoulder, but he could not budge it. He tried to pull it. Since he had braced his feet against the door for leverage, this proved a doomed strategy.

  “Perhaps if we both pushed at once,” he said. Ada returned to her position. Unaccustomed to being asked to perform physical assistance of any sort, she was pleased. “On the count of three, we shall rush at the door with all our might,” he said. “Five, four, three.”

  They both hurtled themselves forward. A curious thing happened then. The door opened, but not by swinging wide, as a book swings open on its hinged spine. Instead, fixed upon a central horizontal axis, the door behaved like a flywheel. The top half fell inward. The White Knight tumbled head-­first through the doorway like a sack of chain-­mail laundry tossed in a chute. At the same time, the bottom half of the door kicked up and outward. Ada was struck in the elbows and knees. She tumbled backward as the White Knight fell forward. She righted herself in time to see his heels disappear behind the closing door, which slammed shut with a snap that had a vindictive character to it.

  The door had revolved. There was still a keyhole, but no key dangled from it. The key was stuck in the keyhole on the other side. The door was locked again. Ada went on her knees once more to try to peer through the keyhole, to call to the Knight, to tell him to open the door from that side. But the keyhole was blocked by the key. She could see nothing more of the serene garden, the Knight, the roses, or the playing cards setting up for the grand fête.

  She stood up. The letters on the doorknob were scrambling about to form a new message. She didn’t care to read depressing
messages. She turned away from it.

  The paneled hall was a forest again, but a dull, cloistered sort of forest. Gone were the hot spots of green and gold that sunlight loves to scatter as a corrective against boskiness. Yet it didn’t feel like evening. It took Ada a moment to realize that she was a little clammy. A mist had begun to seep through the woods. Had she wanted to backtrack toward the Hatter and the Hare at their tea party, she wouldn’t have known which way to go. Moisture was collecting on her skin and her upper lip the way it did when fog crept in at the seaside. She had no shawl. For warmth, she began to walk through the gloom, swinging her arms martially as any perfect little soldier might do.

  The mist curled and tried to rub against her, but she wouldn’t let it touch. She kept up her spirits by reciting certain nursery plaints that Miss Armstrong had been accustomed to delivering in regretful tones.

  “Little Jack Horner and Little Boy Blue

  Fell into trouble and sank in the stew.

  Old Mother Hubbard soon had the pot covered

  And served them for supper. Her dog had some, too.”

  That did not sound entirely as it ought. She tried again.

  “Little Miss Muffet and Mary Contrary

  Found in the garden a spider most scary.

  It stung them and hung them to save them for dinner,

  A fate that awaits the conventional sinner.”

  She hadn’t recalled that the nursery characters knew one another so well. Nor that they were all so bent on dining.

  She hurried along the path, thinking that the fog itself was like a toothless mouth trying to close upon her. A mouth without a body attached. But how odd—­she never thought in sloppy images like this.

  “Robin a’Bobbin, a big-­bellied wren

  Ate more meat than forty men can.

  He ate a church, he ate a steeple,

  He opened the doors and gobbled the ­people.