After Alice (8 page)

 

CHAPTER 19

O
ut of doors they assembled, a most uncommon grouping in Lydia's experience. This child in his easy loping amble, his splendid coffee-­bean skin not exactly a novelty in these lanes, but not so common as to go unnoticed.

This boy, this Siam; and Lydia, in her own weeds of mourning. How well her fair hair showed as it spilled upon the dark shoulders of her summer shawl.

And then this American reed, quicksilver and grave at once, this Mr. Winter. He must have a Chris­tian name, though Lydia had no idea if it might be proper to ask about it outright. With the death of Lydia's mother had come, alas, the loss of maternal guidance. Mrs. Brummidge groused and grumbled, of course; a cook doesn't count. Old Nurse Groader had opinions, and shared them. Still, a nurse can be relied upon to be old-­fashioned, raised up, as such termagants always are, to promote the mores of a hundred years past.

Other nearby female influences? Disconcertingly few. The wives of some neighbors, who found Alice less winsome than weird, and treated Lydia like a Cerberus, skirting her as they approached the Croft with platters of cold sliced roast something or buckets of summer pudding, meant to console and attract the poor widower. Also an elderly spinster cousin in Cumnor, whose dislike for Lydia was returned in spades. Of other relatives there remained none except Lydia's maternal grandmother. Upon the death of her only child, though, the dame had been struck with an affliction binding her tongue to silence. For her own good care she'd been removed to a lying-­in home up the Banbury Road. If she had opinions about Lydia's deportment, ailment required the scold to keep her thoughts to herself.

And so I'm on my own, Lydia thought, as they passed through the gate and into the lane toward the river meadows and, eventually, the University Parks and the Oxford University Museum of Natural History. If conversation lagged she could take Mr. Winter and young Siam through and show them the claw of the dodo, so sensibly extinct.

In silence she began to assemble what she knew of the Museum. It wasn't much. The construction had been funded by the sale of Bibles, a strategy intended to console those who found the close study of nature unseemly if not heretical. Nature is the second book of God, she reminded herself, preparing a defense in case Mr. Winter was religious to a fault, like so many Americans as she'd heard it told. Or was God the second book of Nature? She couldn't remember. Perhaps she'd better avoid the Museum altogether. They'd keep to the riverbank.

She needn't have worried. Once free of the scholastic silence of the old Croft, Mr. Winter became expansive. His heels scuffed at the gravelly track with such force that stones skipped about. He talked of the excitement of being in London for the first time, so far from home, so warmly welcomed thanks to the letters of introduction he had carried.

“But where is your home, when you are at home,” Lydia asked, and even more bravely, “where is his?” Siam was skipping ahead down the path, eager as a beagle to see what lay around the next turn.

“Here, and thereabouts, and wherever,” said Mr. Winter. “We move as we might. Those in allegiance to abolition show boundless courtesy.”

“I'd thought that slavery matter settled, what with your proclamations and amendments and such. I mean, I know about your war, but isn't your Lincoln the local Lord Mansfield?” Lydia hoped they wouldn't become bogged down in a discussion of the times. The only current affair that mattered was the death of her mother. “Our nation gave up the slave trade forty years ago, when Bishop Wilberforce's father made a forceful case against it.”

“The law says one thing, and custom another,” replied Mr. Winter. “What the assemblies legislate and what happens on the back roads of small towns are not always in agreement. Put another way, history takes a long time to happen.”

“I have always lived
here,
” said Lydia, trying to draw him back to the subject. “When you go home, where will you go?”

But he appeared not to hear her. “Will you stay on in Oxford, now that your mother has passed on?”

She felt impatient. “Of course. We are not tinkers in caravans. And my father has his work.”

“What work is that, besides support to the defenders of Darwinism?”

“Pater crawls back and forth in underground corridors, retrieving books requested by scholars in the Bodleian.” She didn't want to talk about her father. “Have you a Chris­tian name, Mr. Winter, or are you so deeply Darwinist that you have become a pagan?”

“You shock me, as you intend.” His tone was mocking.

She considered behaving as if chastised. She dropped her eyes to her hands, which were clasped at her waist. He took mercy, though. He said, “Yes, I am Josiah Winter. I do not know if local practice permits you to call me Josiah, but I would permit it, if I may address you as Lydia.”

“Americans take liberties,” she acknowledged. “Josiah.”

How far down the primrose path will I stray today? she wondered.

“He is in my care, is Siam,” said Josiah Winter. “He has been so, Lydia, ever since a member of our New England congregation received a packet containing the severed ear of a recovered slave.”

“I don't understand.” She hoped he would recognize in her voice a request for restraint. He carried on, as Americans will, deaf to certain subtleties.

“Have you heard of the Underground Railroad?” he asked her.

“I presume you are not talking about those tunnels being dug about Paddington and such.” She was trying to be light-­hearted.

“Siam and some of his kin were headed for Canada West, where slavery has been outlawed several decades now,” he said. “But bounty hunters caught up with them. Siam alone escaped. He has been under my protection since. He is likely to remain with me until his liberty can be promised by civil law. And so I've brought him abroad, for his own safety.”

“He has taken your name,” she said.

“I have given it to him.” A mild correction, saying much she could not interpret.

It was nearly as far as she felt prepared to go on the matter. Siam Winter was leaping about, laughing at bovinity. “I cannot imagine his ordeals, but he has survived them well,” she said. “I assume Mrs. Winter has skills in the kitchen, or she has engaged a cook who knows what boys require to thrive.”

“Oh, there is no Mrs. Winter,” replied Mr. Winter.

 

CHAPTER 20

A
da stopped a short way into the forest. She could no longer hear the Hatter and the Hare. The light was low, but it was a green gloaming rather than a dusky one. The woods grew dense. Huge clusters of flowers of a pale soapsuds color, almost lavender grey, drooped from aged vines. “They are something like wisteria,” she found herself saying aloud, “and something not.”

“A gentleman out strolling in the meadow!” cried an eager voice. “Just what I hoped to see.”

It took Ada a few moments to locate the source of that remark. An elderly man in a rusty coat of chain mail was rooted to the earth by thick ropes of vine. They had grown up around him, coiling woody tendrils around his legs and waist and arms. Even as Ada watched, new fingerlets of green stretched to explore his ears and the wispy white hair upon his pate.

“I'm hardly a gentleman,” she replied, “and this is hardly a meadow.”

“And I am hardly surprised,” he replied. “I tend to muddle. Dear sir, would you be so kind as to untwist this vine from me? I fear I shall be late for the occasion.”

Ada went to work with a will. She tugged at the newest shoots because they were most supple. When they snapped, she began struggling with the more rigid coils. “How did you come to be entrapped?”

“I've always been susceptible to the beauties of nature,” he replied. “Nature knows it, and takes advantage. I heard your utterance—­that the hanging blossoms were something like wisteria and something not—­and I was trying to decide what they were most
not
like. It was either a raven or a writing desk. As I paused to decide, nature got the better of me. There, you are a brave young gentleman. I'm sorry for any damage to your skirts. Your wife must send the bill to my accountant. My solicitors will counter-­sue. The whole merry game will begin again. I am the White Knight, by the way.”

“I am Ada. I am looking for my friend, named Alice. I have no wife. I am no gentleman.”

“Oh, you protest, but quality will out, sir. Look what a comfort you're being.”

Ada had freed his arms. He helped her pick at the thickest parts of the vine around his legs. Eventually he was able to pull his feet out of his metal shoes, leaving them trapped. His stockings were in need of a good rinsing. But he wrenched two bunches of drooping flowers from the nearby vines. He thrust a foot into the midst of each of them. They looked like festive, silvery lilac footwear, more suitable for a visit to the baths than to a court of arbitrage.

“Given your armor, I assume you're a knight with a
K
.”

“Sometimes,” he said, “though I have lost my helmet and visor. For all I know I have misplaced the
K
in my name, too. But I would answer to a White Night, sans the
K,
without blushing.”

“Night as in night-­time? I never heard of a White Night.”

“The more common name of that animal, I believe, is Noon.”

“But there is no night-­time in Noon.”

“Ah yes,” he said, sadly and kindly, “the elderly militia know that there is, there always is. One can die at any moment, you see. Noon is a disguise of whiteness put on by the eternal Night behind it.”

He was old. She didn't want him to talk about death. “Here is your helmet.” As she picked it up from the ferns, a feathery white plume at its crest detached. It flew itself away, looking for all the world like an escaping moustache.

“My love to your devoted mother,” cried the Knight to his plume. To Ada, he said, “That's a fine valet I have, none better. But you've been a good lad, too. I shall put in for a promotion to the Queen. Very likely you shall be made Sergeant-­at-­the-­Lower-­Extremities, as you helped release my legs and feet.”

“I doubt it,” said Ada.

“Well, they already have a Sergeant-­at-­Arms, as far as I've heard. In any case, the Queen will decide. She always does.”

“Are you on your way to see the Queen?” asked Ada.

“In a manner of speaking,” said the old man, looking about dubiously. “That is, I go out of my way
not
to see the Queen, as she has quite a temper, but I am rarely successful.”

“I had heard the Queen was temperate,” said Ada.

“Ill-­tempered, temperate, a distinction without a difference,” said the Knight. “As
illiterate
can refer to a cat who refuses to deliver a litter of kittens and instead delivers newspapers it has no capacity to read.”

“Ill-­tempered and temperate
are
most certainly different states. They are opposites.”

“The Queen has become quite raveled over the theft of her tarts,” insisted the Knight. “And you know what
that
means.”

“No.”

“It means unraveled. I rest my case.”

Ada did not care to be rude. Still, she insisted, “Opposites cannot mean the same thing.”

“Do you cleave to your belief about that?”

“Of course, or I shouldn't have made the remark.”

“Then cleave yourself from your beliefs. It's much of a muchness, or such of a suchness.”

“Well,” said Ada, “in
any
case, I've never known an illiterate cat!”

“Don't become raveled or unraveled over it. Sir, shall we go?”

Ada took his arm, as he seemed a bit wobbly on his pins. They made their way through the underbrush. “I have always heard that Queen Victoria was moderate in her tastes,” ventured Ada.

“I never heard that at all,” replied the Knight. “Then, I have never heard of Queen Victoria.”

“But you mentioned the ill-­temper of the Queen.”

“I was referring to the Queen of Hearts,” he replied. “Ever since her tarts were stolen clean away, she's been in a foul disposition. No one wants to attend her
fête
today, but if everyone sent in regrets she'd be left alone on the playing ground. She'd have to call for her own head to be cut off.”

“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?”