After Alice Read online

  Ada could know none of this, of course, but in cooler moments Ada saw Miss Armstrong clearly enough. Severe, knobby, left-­handed, Chapel rather than Church, chiding and churlish by turns, pliant only where Ada’s father was concerned. Untapped fervors.

  The girl tried to be patient. Vexing though the new baby was proving to be, he might thrive long enough to require a governess. He might pivot Miss Armstrong’s attentions away from Ada. Currently the infant had a wet nurse, a nanny, and a steady visitation of doctors, who all thought something might be achieved for the boy, eventually. Or that’s what they said. If it lived.

  But enough of Miss Armstrong and the dreadful baby. Ada is outside, alone: She is scraping against life the way her brother is. She is newly in the world.

  CHAPTER 5

  Had Ada known anything of painting, she might have approved of the view before her as a suitable subject for Constable. A vitality in the clouds suggested muscular air, though just now the riverside poplars stood still, as if holding their breath. The world pauses for royalty and deformity alike, and sometimes one can’t tell the difference.

  Oxfordshire was not very like Essex or Suffolk, of course. But Ada was not thinking of Constable and rural English landscapes, but of Hell, and how the city of Oxford, its edges braided with rivers and its atmosphere close and clammy at times, was comfortably unlike Hell.

  Since the arrival of her brother, Ada had become better educated in the atmospherics of the underworld. On the night of the bloody nappy, her parents had grown distracted enough for Ada to get her hands on her father’s volume of Dante’s Inferno, the first French edition of 1861. Ada could read no French but she could understand French pictures. The sensational illustrations were by Doré. They weren’t yet popularized in England; this edition had been procured in Paris by some clerical colleague of the Reverend Boyce.

  She had pored over the pages of the purloined book. She could glean little of the story of Dante’s journey underground. But what a tale the pictures told. Everywhere gloom, and mystery, and oddment. Barren landscapes of slag-­slope; creatures rare and frightening; and firm-­fleshed nakedness throughout. Miss Armstrong, coming athwart Ada, had pounced. She’d impounded the book under her own pillow. She’d declared that worry had deranged the Master and sherry the Mistress, and for the nonce they were unfit to supervise their own children.

  But too late. Ada had been vouchsafed a glimpse of the underworld. What glustery, ghastly improbabilities might open up beneath the roots of the Iffley yew, should the Boyces have to dig a grave in the family plot at the Church of Saint Mary for the burial of Infant Male! Ada hoped she might be excused from attending the interment. If any of those scaly-­tailed figures were to emerge from the soil, let them grasp Miss Armstrong and drag her down, Persephone in Pluto’s dirty palace. Miss Armstrong might find a new position, one more to her liking.

  Children tread the line between worlds. “Suffer the little children to come unto me” isn’t just the granting of permission, but the announcement of privilege, preferment.

  So here we are. On her way to her friend’s house, Ada rounded a copse of copper beeches along the riverbank. She came upon Alice’s older sister sitting in the shade. Lydia had a big book in her lap. She looked up at Ada, startled. Perhaps lulled by the wind on the water, the morning light in the leaves, Lydia had been about to drowse. “Oh, you,” Lydia said, with little affection. “You must be looking for Alice.”

  “Must I?” asked Ada. “I’ve been sent to deliver a gift of marmalade to the household.”

  “I shouldn’t go there, were I you. Mr. Darwin of great renown is visiting today, and he and Papa are arguing about stuff and nonsense. They sent Alice and me away as they thought us too impressionable. Alice is about somewhere. She was here a moment ago. What is that dreadful odor?”

  “It’s the opodeldoc. For my rheumatism. What are you reading?” The book was splayed in full view. It featured nothing like the thrilling pictures of Doré. Only paired columns of type. There seemed to be no dialogue.

  “You’re too young for rheumatism. I should revolt if they tried to rub me with an unguent that nasty. Oh, the book? Papa thrust it at me and told me to read to Alice, but you know Alice. I was trying to do as I was told. The piece is about a Shakespeare play, A Midsummer Night’s Dream. I doubt you’ve heard of it.”

  “Father deplores the stage. ‘Vice in Three Acts,’ he says.”

  “Curious. I didn’t know there were that many acts of vice.” Lydia had fifteen years to Ada’s ten, and everything the older girl said sounded as if it meant more than Ada could understand. “Ah, well. It would be easier to watch this folderol than it is to read about it.” Lydia yawned. “Alice was here a moment ago. Perhaps she has wandered over to look at the stork nest. You might find her there.” Lydia pointed to some imprecise horizon. “You know our Alice. She plays hide-­and-­seek but sometimes forgets to ask someone to look for her.”

  “I’ll continue on to your house and perform my duty.”

  “What a little prig you are. Stay out of Darwin’s way or he’ll turn you into a monkey. Or maybe an ass.” Lydia flapped one hand at Ada. She turned a page of her book with the other. Then she paused. “Is someone calling after you?”

  “Surely not,” said Ada.

  “Is that your governess? What is her name? Miss Armstrong? The tightly sprung woman from Wolverhampton?” She made Wolverhampton sound like Purgatory.

  “Holy Hell,” said Ada. “I’ll be going now.”

  “The language of you young ­people.” Lydia sighed. So few years on Ada, yet such opportunity for condescension. “Hide-­and-­seek, you too? I may pretend to be dozing so as not to have to speak to your governess. Though I suppose in any case she will sniff you out. Your medicinal cologne.”

  Ada didn’t reply. She hurried to the other side of the tree, where a companion tree joined it at the ankle. The pair leaned out over the water, and Ada tried to lean along with them so they would conceal her. The double trunk split into tuberous roots, forming a proto-­Gothic archway in the sandy bank just inches above the river. From that join, Ada saw a nose and then a face emerge, twitching. A denizen of the riverbank worried himself out. Adjusting his waistcoat and standing erect, he turned this way and that. He seemed not to notice Ada. She was in the shadows. She didn’t dare call out to Lydia for fear she would startle the creature, but really: a white rabbit in a gentleman’s waistcoat! Who could possibly have run up that snug apparel and struggled him into it?

  “Miss Lydia,” called Miss Armstrong, brisking along the path that meandered toward the riverbank from the outcrop of distant homes. “I was to accompany Miss Ada on her perambulations, but she left the Vicarage before I was ready. I am quite cross with her.”

  Ada didn’t dare move. She watched Lydia expertly drop her head back upon the grassy bolster as if in slumberland. Good. She would not give Ada away. Ada leaned farther along the slant of the trees, trying to become more shadow-­covered. The rabbit had hopped a few feet toward the sunlight, but at the sound of Miss Armstrong’s voice he froze. “The time has got away from me,” cried Miss Armstrong, “I couldn’t locate my gloves. Miss Lydia, is Ada about? Have you seen her?” Then her voice dropped; she had noticed Lydia’s closed eyes. “Beg pardon,” whispered Miss Armstrong, and turned this way and that, as if sniffing for Ada.

  All at once Ada found that she’d stepped into the rabbit-­hole. If she didn’t get loose, she’d be stuck here, clenched by soil and tree-­root, pounced upon by her persecutrix. She put the marmalade jar in the pocket of her pinafore and reached down to dig her foot out. Though mere inches from the river, the sandy soil was dry and easily shoveled away. Still, bending at the waist was hard labor for Ada. Before she could retract her ankle, a sub-­flooring of rotted root-­mass gave way. She was in as far as her knee. She knelt, she had no choice, and she scrabbled at the yielding earth. She was swallowed up by the ground,
just as she had hoped would happen to Miss Armstrong in Iffley churchyard. She found herself falling into darkness.

  CHAPTER 6

  Another curious thing happened then.

  A month ago Ada had noticed that she was outgrowing her iron corset, that penitential vest intended to tame the crookedness in her spine. Due to the fuss around her mother’s troublesome pregnancy and the wretched offspring it produced, a new device had yet to be fabricated. Now, as Ada fell, the contraption underneath her outer clothes sprang open of its own accord. Ada was accustomed to such relief only in the bath or in dreams. How could the cord slip free from the grommets while she tumbled? The articulated halves of her portable prison were ripping through the cotton husking of her clothes. The appendages flapped behind her. Tatters of fabric—­her camisole, her chemise—­rippled. She was so shocked at the sense of liberty that it took her a moment to notice that this was a tumble without a stop.

  In time—­and when does a fall take time, except for the drift of a leaf or a snowflake, or perhaps a lapse into perdition?—­Ada’s attention turned to her plight. She was dropping down the middle of a cylindrical shaft shaped like a very long, very clean smoke-­stack. What furnace but the fires of Hell might require such a column? In any event, all ought to have been Stygian darkness if she’d sunk more than a yard from the tree roots. But a pellucid gleam struck the walls at regular intervals. She couldn’t tell where the subtle light came from. It seemed inherent rather than solar.

  The sides of the vertical tunnel were paved neatly in Cotswold stone. This shaft must have taken laborers seven years to build, she guessed. Goodness, but it was lengthy. Perhaps she had slipped into some sort of sleeve inside a wheel-­rim that went all the way around the globe, under the surface of the world, and joined up with itself in an endless circuit. The wheel that made the world turn. Eventually she would meet up with the hole she had first slipped into. Maybe she’d pop out again, head-­first like that rabbit. Or maybe, while she was making her orbit, workers were sealing the breakage. When she reached the spot she’d entered, it would just be more stone, more brick. No doorway out. She’d fall forever and never land. She’d be the world’s first internal asteroid.

  Or what if she actually was dropping straight down, and would come out in the Antipodes? She might have to learn to walk on her hands. It could scarcely be harder than balancing on her feet, she supposed. Balance, as Miss Armstrong often reminded Ada, was a gift from the Lord to those who deserved it.

  She heard a distant scream. Not terrified, but startled. Was it some screech she had made herself, an echo still ricocheting along the walls? Ada couldn’t tell from which direction the sound had come. Might it be, perhaps, Alice? Was she here, too? If so, had she already fallen, or was she above Ada, just starting her descent?

  Nothing to be done about it now, but wait till they met up. If they did.

  She began to notice alcoves in the stonework. Some of them had been used as shelves. She must be falling more slowly than she thought, for by training herself to concentrate, Ada could make out some of the items. A candle snuffer like the one she’d once smuggled outside, in an attempt to catch a minnow while Miss Armstrong was lost in rue. Ada had dropped it in the water. How had it ended up here? Well, down here? And then a row of books. They looked suspiciously like those astringent volumes that Miss Armstrong had tried to read aloud until, one by one, Ada had misplaced them under sofa cushions or in the fireplace. Why, there was The History of the Fairchild Family! Ada recognized the scuffed bands on the spine of brown roan. How Miss Armstrong had shivered over the moral depravity exhibited by little lisping Henry, Emily, and Lucy Fairchild. Surely Ada had lost that book, thoroughly, in the grate? She’d stood there for some time, poking the pyre of coals so that no evidence of her own corruption survived to thrill her governess.

  Ada was now falling so languorously that the book was within her reach. She could grab it to see if her name was written in the flyleaf. But she left it where it was. Should she be falling into Hell, she wouldn’t be surprised to see The History of the Fairchild Family as a set text for the instruction of the juvenile damned. She felt she could almost quote her father’s favorite passage. The one where pious Mr. Fairchild takes his sin-­weakened children to see a corpse hanging on a gibbet. “The body of a man hung in chains; it had not yet fallen to pieces, although it had hung there some years. It had on a blue coat, a silk handkerchief round the neck, with shoes and stockings and every other part of the dress still entire; but the face of the corpse was shocking, that the children could not look upon it. ‘When ­people are found guilty of stealing, or murder, they are hanged upon a gallows . . . till the body falls to pieces, that all who pass by may take warning by the example.’ ” Ada felt she could wait a while longer to meet this passage anew, and so she left the book where it was.

  If she truly were falling in some sort of circuit, vast or immediate, she would pass this location again. Why shouldn’t she place something else here and see if she came across it later? That would prove circularity of a sort. Should she leave behind her corset? No—­while it had sprung free like an open trap, tearing her clothes, its iron webbing was still affixed to her arms. Perhaps the jar of marmalade in the pocket of her pinafore? Very well. If she deposited it here without delivering it to Alice’s family at the Croft, it would become something she’d stolen. It would belong in this treasury of ill-­gotten goods. So, soon enough, voilà, an empty ledge. As she reached to put the jar on the shelf, though, she dropped it. It fell more swiftly than she did, disappearing beneath her in the ill-­lit gloom. She didn’t hear anything like a smash, or anyone crying out, “Oy! Watch it up there!” Oh well. Marmalade has to make its own way in life, like the rest of us, she thought.

  What with her tormented spine, she’d never been allowed to swim. She wondered if this was the time to try. She raked her limbs. She only succeeded in inching her corset farther off her arms. It wouldn’t come off unless she undressed herself almost entirely. If I am headed to Hell, where’s the harm, she thought. According to Doré, everyone is naked there. She wriggled out of her pinafore and then her smock and her torn chemise. The back brace, which often rubbed her raw despite the shift that she wore underneath it, began to clink and clatter. Twisting in the air, like Jacob wrestling with the angel, Ada managed to remove one arm from the iron sleeve-­hole. The second arm slipped out much more easily. “Good-­bye!” she said to the device as it arched its grommety iron spine and extended its ribs. It took to solo flight. It didn’t fall as she fell, but began to rise. Soon it was out of sight. What that sourpuss Lydia would think of the iron brace emerging from the rabbit-­hole without its cargo of twisted child, Ada couldn’t begin to imagine. Up until ten minutes ago, Ada had not had much experience in the practice of imagination.

  She was dropping faster. Since she was now falling face forward, she saw that she was catching up with the marmalade jar. Shortly she reached it and snatched it out of the air. Now she would store it, and see if it showed up again. Upon the next ledge she came across, two mice were larking about. They were dressed in blue denim caps and chewing on stems of grass. As if they’d been expecting her for most of eternity, they accepted the jar of marmalade she thrust their way with brisk, businesslike nods. One of them winked. The other tipped his cap. “It’s meant for the Croft,” she told them, in case they were going toward Alice’s house. However, Alice’s house was home to that wicked cat, Dinah, so perhaps mice would be unwilling to make deliveries to that particular larder.

  Would she see the marmalade again, and the Fairchild Family? Would her flying corset come sweeping toward her from below? If so, that would be proof she was falling in an endless circle. She’d have to take up a hobby of some sort if she were to fall for eternity.

  Would she become lonely? Now there was an interesting question. She’d never been alone long enough to imagine what being lonely might be like. Perhaps she’d have the chance to try. She might
even like it.

  Before she could decide whether or not she was pleased at this possibility, her fall ended suddenly. Not in a bloody splatter, as she might have feared had she got around to thinking about it, but in a shattering splash. Salt water closed over her head before she knew what was happening. A liquid ceiling divided her from the crepuscular tunnel above. Her eyes closed of their own accord. Gone were the mice, and marmalade, and much else she had not yet had a chance to examine closely.

  Death, Ada’s father had begun recently to insist, comes to us all.

  CHAPTER 7

  Lydia. The sister who sits and reads in a book “with no pictures and no conversation.”

  Lydia’s charade of napping has worked. Her eyelids are aware of a blond blur, a diffusion of sunlight. Miss Armstrong, the pinch-­nosed spinster from the Vicarage, has passed by, hastening through the grass.

  Having let the volume fall closed, Lydia leaves it like that. It pinches her finger. She doesn’t mind if she loses her place. She has only the dimmest sense of what Shakespeare is on about in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Yet, almost against her will, Lydia has begun to absorb a notion proposed by the essayists. Shakespeare’s farrago of a comedy, they suggest, is a series of nested stories. The maestro Shakespeare wants the theatregoer to see them as if cupped one within the next, or at least contiguous: a royal ­couple at their leisure; the court of magical Titania and Oberon and fierce Puck; the rustics practicing for their crude theatrical; the performance of that sketch itself, which is another world. Does it go further in? Lydia has lost track.

  As she lolls in a state of sleep-­like abandon (it is not sleep, it is not a dream), Shakespeare’s embedded narratives begin to merge and overlap. Does the lion played by Peter Quince have any significance to Puck? Do Puck’s tricks matter in the lives of Theseus and Hippolyta, crowned heads of Athens? Does Shakespeare matter to a pubescent girl? Lydia, Lydia, one hip nudging the bole of a tree, half sprawled on sweet summer grass.