After Alice (10 page)

 

CHAPTER 23

T
he governess again! A riverbank nixie gone mad for interruption into human affairs. Puck's countervalence. Lydia could spit. But the manifestation of Miss Armstrong snapped Lydia to attention. So far, Mr. Josiah Winter had proven little more than an unexpected aspect of Lydia's morning. If, in time to come, this June day would be picked out in her memory for special notice, it would be because she had strolled upon the riverbank with a young American gentleman. True, their duet of comments and potent pauses had been only an experiment at grown-­up conversation. But they
were
together as a pair, strolling. A first, for Lydia.

With Miss Armstrong hieing into view, however, the dalliance of this walk, the private silly adventure of it, was now beaten into something public and coarse. This encounter on the Cherwell bank would lie between Lydia and Miss Armstrong, unmentioned, every time their paths crossed for the rest of their lives.

She glared at Miss Armstrong swooping across the meadow, cutting the diagonal the more quickly to meet them. Miss Armstrong was watching where she placed her feet. She didn't notice Lydia's ferocity. And Lydia thought: The court and the rabble of Athens move so quickly into the woods, stung and shifted by magic, abused by Puck. Shakespeare was showing how any social event is composed of separate simultaneous experiences, whose meanings differ, and must be negotiated into commonality if history is to occur.

She had no intention of negotiating with Miss Armstrong, but Lydia was stuck like a wasp in honey. The stroll was no longer hers alone. Hers, and Mr. Winter's.

“I was hoping to waylay you, Miss Lydia,” huffed Miss Armstrong. She put out her hand to grasp Lydia by the wrist, in friendship or worry. Lydia offered no wrist. After a moment Mr. Winter held out his hand. Miss Armstrong recoiled with flare, as if she hadn't noticed the gentleman till his hand appeared. “Begging your pardon, sir; I am interrupting your meander. I am—­”

“Mr. Winter, may I present Miss Armstrong,” said Lydia. It was not a question. “A governess from the Vicarage along the way.” The tone in which she said
governess
had a likeness to iron.

“How do you do.” Mr. Winter bowed from the waist.

Rallying, Miss Armstrong became downright Bohemian. “Miss Lydia, the Vicarage has gone turnips to toast! Ada has not returned, but that's the least of it. The infant is squalling as if being pricked with invisible needles. The doctor has been sent for. Mrs. Boyce has taken the boy to her bosom. She has turned the Vicar out of the sewing room. He is
beside
himself, and you know what he is
like
!”

Lydia had no idea what the Vicar was like. She was not interested in learning. She couldn't decipher this story, with its needles and bosoms and squallings. Oh, so the infant had the hiccups. To judge by the look on Miss Armstrong's face, the Pennines would now collapse and the Hebrides float away toward Norway. But all this drama couldn't deter Lydia from her obligations, much as she tried to resist them. “Miss Armstrong, this is Mr. Winter, lately of London though originating in those pestered States across the ocean.”

“I understand,” said Miss Armstrong in a tone of regret. She put a hand to her bonnet brim as if to brush away a horsefly. “Miss Lydia, I am beside myself.”

“So I see,” said Lydia. “I have no words of advice for you, though. We are engaged in our own campaigns. We're out looking for Alice, as she hasn't returned either. No one has reached a state of alarm, mind you. Alice never goes far. She merely goes . . .” She thought. “Deep.”

Miss Armstrong murmured, “Where is the boy who looks after the sheep, but under the haystack, fast asleep.” They began to walk together, a hateful trio.

“I know that nursery ditty,” said Mr. Winter. “It is sung at the cots of Concord babes. Interesting how the word
fast
suggests, in that instance, a way of holding. From the word
fastened,
I suppose. Locked in sleep, kept.”

“Is it possible that Ada is locked in sleep somewhere with her head on Alice's shoulder?” said Miss Armstrong. “Has
anyone
seen Ada today?”

“One might imagine she'd been pushed into the river and drowned, to simplify her life and everyone else's,” said Lydia.

“No one could imagine such a thing,” protested Miss Armstrong.

“You did,” said Lydia. “You told me earlier. You pictured Ada fetched up against the milldam, as I re—­”

“The marmalade—­”

“Ada and her marmalade!” Lydia made an airy, dismissive sound like a French laundress. How Miss Armstrong could jabber as she walked! “Miss Lydia, Ada can't have gone far. But some forbidden destination would have appealed to her more strongly than the company of Alice.” In an aside to Mr. Winter, Lydia said, “My sister isn't always attentive. Oh, she's never unkind, but she's easily distractible. If she and Ada were playing a game of hide-­and-­search, and Ada had closed herself in a wardrobe, Alice might decide to go dig worms in the garden and drop them in the well. Ada could spend the day waiting to be found.”

“Don't say that!” Miss Armstrong took a fright. “Mr. Winter, Ada Boyce has never gone out alone before today. It's always been my pleasure to walk with her endlessly, endlessly, hither and yon,
endlessly,
but what with turmoil at home, Ada escaped me. The Vicar—­oh, possessed of such piety!” She shook her head; her shoulders wobbled, too. “And Mrs. Boyce, distracted by the nuisance of a newborn, and all her natural feeling for her husband channeled elsewhere. It is a harlequinade, a harlequinade enacted in a torched and smoking rectory, by ­people devastated with terror and madeira.” She had said too much, of course, she had flung her
self
into the river and drowned. She blinked two or three times like a Guernsey surprised to have just delivered an aria. She lowered her parasol, closed it. She stabbed the ground with it as if to kill the very earth upon which she walked. She lifted both hands in a gesture of defeat that didn't fool Lydia for a moment. “I am not myself today,” said Miss Armstrong by way of apology, in a softer tone.

“Few are,” said Mr. Winter. Lydia couldn't tell if he was being amusing or rude. “Of course, we'll look for your Ada while we keep an eye out for Miss Lydia's sister. Would you care to walk along with us?”

Lydia couldn't bear it. “I suspect, Miss Armstrong, that having escaped you, Ada took the chance to engage a boatman to take her across the river. I seem to think she said something of the sort. To explore the other side, she said. And look, there's a boatman lolling down on that spit. Just there. Perhaps you should hire him yourself, and go have a look around that side of the river. We'll check out this side. One
never knows
.” The tone was ominous. “Of course if we find Ada we'll send her home at once. I have already told you that, Miss Armstrong.”

But now Miss Armstrong was weeping. Lydia could have given her a good hard kick. “I can't begin to tell you what it would mean—­to us—­if I were sent away!” she sobbed. Mr. Winter stopped, pale. Had he never encountered a volatile woman before? He put out his hand and settled it upon Miss Armstrong's shoulder. She couldn't look up, but she raised one hand and rested it upon his as if they had known one another for twenty years. The bells began to sound the quarter hour. The sun blinked behind a cloud. For a moment the colors took on a hasty intensity. The first cloud after a session of blinding sunlight is a shade of the underworld, a hint of the grave and even how it might smell. Lydia felt a shiver of dread, but overcame it.

“I understand what you feel,” said Mr. Winter. “Should anything happen to my lad, I would be beside myself.”

“Your lad,” chimed Miss Armstrong questioningly.

“Siam.” Lydia spoke with a ferocious oratorical clarity. “Ahead of us on the path. Halloo, Siam!” she called to the boy, who turned and waved.

Miss Armstrong lost some ground. It was too much. “You may be right,” she said to someone, to herself. Who knew what she meant? She pivoted away from the riverbank path and began beating down the shallow slope to the water's edge. Lydia turned her shoulder; the subject was closed. As the moment passed, the dome of the Radcliffe Camera in the distance came out of shadow into the sun. The stodgy beauties of the colleges, and all these comic barbarians at their finialed gates.

“What a passionate creature,” said Mr. Winter.

“She's an utter lunatic.”

“But look, she's left behind her parasol. She'll need it, with the sun on the water. Miss Armstrong,” he called, with what Lydia thought was perhaps not a full-­throated effort. Distance, and the noise of the governess's rushing skirts, must have kept her from hearing. “I shall go after her and deliver it,” he decided. “I shall ambush her by the launch, hand her the thing, and return, like so. Keep on along the riverbank.” He indicated with a nod of his head a path ahead by which he'd come back to Lydia. “I shall rejoin you along the way, having made a triangle of it. With your permission.”

Lydia didn't give permission, but he was off on his own, gamboling like an idiotic April lamb. She didn't want to witness the reunion from this distance, any distance. She suspected he would loiter. She hated him, she hated them both. She turned her face into the wind. She looked for black Siam, a sentimental silhouette against the diamond-­dashed glitter and glare of a backwash of the Cherwell. She cupped her hands at her mouth. “I say,” she called to him, at a volume she knew the adults couldn't hear. “We're told to head back. Come with me.”

 

CHAPTER 24

W
e must now, if only for a moment, consider Siam on the riverbank, and what he sees. He examines life as intently as anyone else in this history. That the puzzlingly kind Mr. Josiah is loping along the bank, away from him—­this causes in Siam a mix of relief and anxiety at the same instant. And what of Miss Lydia, the half-­adult missie, with her flaxen hair pulled forward in a way that fails to disguise the vastness of her forehead? She puts Siam in mind of the white cliffs of Albion, as Mr. Josiah had named them, on the vessel that brought them from Oostende.

Persons like Miss Lydia are an unknown element in Siam's life. His experience with white females of that age has been so chaperoned as to kill conversation. He doesn't think in terms of vixen, virago, or virgin. He thinks she is attractive, though perhaps an aberration, like one of those new barnacles or orchids about which Mr. Josiah has yammered with Mr. Darwin. They broke the mold before they cast her, he thinks. That is perhaps not quite right. Still, it seems fitting.

Of Miss Armstrong he has no opinion. She is a wild improbability whom he can see but has not met. He watched Mr. Josiah loping down a sloping bank toward her. Miss Lydia is hollering something to Siam. He ventures a few feet nearer to see if he can understand her words beneath her accent.

 

CHAPTER 25

T
he woods began to thin. The sound of hastening footsteps in the fog took on sloshy echo. They were running through marsh grass now, wetlands. Their feet were soaked. Perhaps we are at the side of the ocean, thought Ada. “The salt air will do you no good,” she panted to the Tin Ballerina and the Tin Bear. “You will come down with a pox.”

“I adore salt,” huffed Humpty Dumpty. “Salt completes me.”

“We mustn't plunge into the sea or we would have to consider drowning,” said the Tin Bear. “And I'm not sure I'm capable of that. I'd be an utter failure.”

The noise of their pursuer only intensified. They heard a hunger in that racket, or some other ambition. The Jabberwock, if such it was, must be lost in the fog, too. They cringed at the creak and clang of its limbs, which seemed in the thickening air to be all around them.

“We are but poor players a-­wandering in the muck and the mire,” said the Tin Ballerina. “It's time we relied upon a higher power. We must put ourselves in the hands of loftier management.”

“All right,” said the Tin Bear. He unfolded from his valise a baker's dozen of brightly colored kites, in patterns of red and black and white. Each had a string attached to one corner. The Tin Bear tied the other ends of the strings to various limbs of the traveling troupe.

“I'm afraid we don't have any extras,” said the Tin Ballerina to Ada. “But you may hold my hand for comfort and guidance, if you like. Perhaps you will be lifted up by our society.”

“There does not seem to be much uplift in my day today,” said Ada, “but I'm willing to try.”

“Good. You run ahead. When the wind catches the kite, launch it,” said the Tin Ballerina.

“How do you do this when you're all alone?” she asked.

“Privately,” said the Tin Ballerina. “Run!”

Ada ran. When the string stretched taut and a wind came up, she tossed the kite up into the fog. Before it rose and disappeared into the mist, it turned once or twice. The kite was made of a playing card.

“That was a Three of Diamonds,” she shouted to the troupe of players.

“The sky is improved by additional diamonds,” said Humpty Dumpty. “Next kite, hurry! That creature is getting closer.”

It took only a few moments before all thirteen kites were launched. They disappeared into the low cloud cover. Ada now saw that the creatures had been transformed into marionettes. The tin cutouts and Humpty Dumpty were each suspended a few feet in the air by four kite-­card strings. Humpty clenched the string to the Ace between his teeth, perhaps because he was top-­heavy.

“We are now in fine hands,” said the Tin Ballerina, glancing skyward.

“My hand is finer than yours,” mumbled Humpty Dumpty. “I have a royal flush.”

“Oh,” said the Tin Bear to Ada, “I forgot; we do have one final kite. We rarely use it, but you are welcome to it if you like. It is a Joker.”

“Ah.” Ada wasn't sure if this was a good idea. It seemed impolite to turn the offer down, though, so she launched herself a kite. She gripped the string as the wind began to lead them in a direction that had no whether-­or-­not to it. They weren't lifted far off the ground but skipped and hopped as marionettes do, untroubled by gravity, drawn by strings directing them from the sky.

“How do you know this is the right way?” she asked.

“We do not question our higher power,” said Humpty Dumpty. “It knows best.”

“We are but tugged at the whim of the Creator,” agreed the Tin Bear.

“Though we struggle in fog, our fate is in the cards,” called the Tin Ballerina. And who knew but that she was right, for the sound of the menacing creature that pursued them began to recede a little. The kites dragged Ada, the Tin Ballerina, the Tin Bear, and Humpty Dumpty so quickly that there was no more breath for talking. It reminded Ada of going for a walk with Miss Armstrong.

At length the mist began to dissipate. It seemed they must have covered many miles. The wind slackened. The kites drooped and failed. They found themselves pausing in a mature beech woods, right at the door of a small, stately home made of stone and, it seemed, crumpets and old boots.

They untied their strings and rolled them up, and they crammed the kites back in the valise of the Tin Bear. “You are most admirable marionettes,” admitted Ada.

“We have no say in the matter,” said the Tin Ballerina, without remorse. “Life blows us where it will. Hither, thither, and whether. We play our little witty roles. I should have liked to run a boardinghouse, but life has not given me that.”

“Hush,” said the Tin Bear. “Is that the wind, or has the Terror of the Fog followed us even here?”

Sure enough, a strangled iron cry reverberated a good ways off. If it had followed them this far, alas, it would come nearer. Ada rapped on the door, hoping for the best.

In short order the door was opened by a sleepy-­looking housemaid in a mob-­cap. “They've all gone off,” she said grumpily. “Go away.”

“They've gone, and we've come,” said the Tin Bear. “Let us in.”

“I'm not scared of a dancing bear with a portmanteau stuck on his noodle,” said the housemaid, but she opened the door just the same. “Very well, if there's no stopping you.”

“Who's gone off?” asked Ada as they crowded into the filthy kitchen. A pot of soup had bubbled down to grime and was gently scorching upon the hob.

“Why, the Duchess, of course, and the Cook. The Duchess went to the garden party in high dudgeon, but the Cook wasn't invited, so she went to her sister's in low spirits.”

“High Dudgeon and Low Spirits,” said Humpty Dumpty. “Very fine addresses, both. I don't suppose you have a bite to offer us?”

“There's naught to eat, what with that pig about,” said the housemaid, “so keep a proper tongue in your head or we'll see how large a
soufflé
you might make.” She sat on a stool and picked up her knitting. She seemed to be devising a morning coat out of seaweed.

A terrible roar, all too close, descended upon the house. Through the window they could see crumpets falling off the roof. A glory of soot emitted from the chimney. Ada and the marionettes clung to one another, but the housemaid only yawned. “I wonder if that's the Baby wanting its brekky,” said the housemaid. “Baby
likes
eggs.”

“I adore babies myself,” said Humpty Dumpty, flashing some pointy teeth.

“Is that the noise of the Jabberwock?” asked Ada.

“I couldn't say. I wouldn't know a Jabberwock from a Wockerjab. Could be Baby in a state. Perhaps Baby knows.” The housewife opened a little iron door to a bread oven. A pig poked his head out the aperture.

“Is that you making such a horrid row?” asked the housemaid. The pig shook his snout. The stertorous commotion seemed to have landed on the eaves, as the room was showered with crumbs and dust. The housemaid said to the guests, “Baby has a wicked chest cold, but that cough belongs to something else. Maybe that Jockerwab you was collecting, for a specimen, was it?”

“And what
is
a Jabberwock?” asked Ada.

At this the Baby turned his little snout up and rolled his little piggy eyes at her. He began to speak.

“And what's a Jabberwock, you ask?

To answer is a gruesome task.

It is not ape though ape it may.

To be a bee it cannot be.

‘Not carp?' you carp; ‘Not carp,' I say.

Nor dog, though dogged, I decree.

It is not ewe—­how you amuse!—­

Nor fish, although you fish for clues—­”

“Intolerable nonsense,” interrupted Humpty Dumpty.

“You've ruined my line of thought,” snapped the Baby.

“Just finish up, and then we'll know what a Jabberwock truly is,” said Ada peaceably enough. “Knowledge comes at the end.”

“The end part goes like this,” said the Baby sharply.

“The only sound it makes is sproink,

And on the matter, by my bladder, that's my final oink.”

Then the Baby wiggled out of the bread oven, fell on the floor, and turned and bit his own curly tail in annoyance.

“We didn't hear all the
other
animals it isn't,” said Ada. “So how will we recognize it when we find it?”

“It'll find you,” said the Baby grimly, snuffling for crumbs under the pastry table.

“Does either of you know the way to the garden party?” said Ada. “That's where we are headed. The marionettes are performing, and I am looking for a friend.”

“
You'll
never find a friend, not with that attitude!” said Humpty Dumpty.

The housemaid said to Ada, “I'll show you how to get to the garden gate, though I'd not go inside myself. I'm not invited.”

“And a good thing, too,” said the Baby, eating a tea towel off the airing rack. “
You'd
bring the tone down, you would.”

“No sugar-­water for you,” said the housemaid, “if you're going to make personal remarks.”

“It's the only kind I know how to make.” The Baby began to run around the table, oinking up a storm. “I think the Jabberwock is eating the roof! Everybody hide.”

“Quick,” said the housemaid. She stood and put on the seaweed jacket. It now seemed as broad as a cape, and somehow it was capacious enough for all of them to huddle under. Crumbs of plaster dust like caster sugar showered upon them as she drew the edges of the coat together. “I always find if you're caught at home without a vorpal blade, a seaweed frock serves as a fine caution against germs and Jabberwocks.” She fastened a snap somehow. They plunged into darkness.