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Olive rounded a bank of birch stumps and mauve moss wriggling in such a way that she absolutely did not want to look any closer—and yet she did, for that was a something, too. The moss wasn’t wriggling at all, rather, hundreds of silkworms wriggled while they feasted on it. Only these were actually silkworms—not ugly blind little scraps of beef suet, but creatures made up entir
ely of rich, embroidered silk brocade, fat as a rich lady, writhing greedily over the bank. Olive shuddered, and in her shuddering, nearly toppled over the somethings she’d been after.
In a clearing in the wood stood three hacked-off marble capitals, the sort meant to crown pillars in a grand bank or Hungarian cathedral. Her capitals. The very ones that hung so stupidly and dearly on her parlour wall. Only these were hopping about on their own recognizance, as if they were really and truly the wolf, hare, and raven that had been carved into their fine stone blocks.
The wolf’s head, surrounded by carved fern-heads and flowers, the very one that had snarled within the looking glass and snoozed without, looked Olive up and down. The hare wriggled her veiny marble nose. The raven fluffed his sculpted feathers.
“Bloody tourists,” the wolf snipped.
Seven Maids with Seven Mops
Alice watches another couple without expression. The man cuts the woman’s meat for her. The woman stares into the distance while he saws away silently at her pork. A repeating face, turned away, a woman watching a woman watching nothing. Staring and sighing and gnawing, the great human trinity. Peter has a strange and horrible instinct to lean over the table, the salads, the beer, the scotch, the candles, the world, their whole useless strained, copyedited lives and kiss Alice. To make himself cheap, as Wendy did in that cruel first scene in the nursery. He has always kissed first in his life. Always tried to redeem that little viciousness in the other Peter, whose heart was an acorn and whose kiss was a jest. She is so much older than he, but Peter loves older women, since he was hardly yet a man. Guiltily, and to great sorrow, but who could ask more of the most famous motherless boy in all of history?
He doesn’t do it. Of course he doesn’t. He, too, is of a certain era, and that era does not clear dining tables for the madness of love.
“At least your man stayed to look after you,” Alice says finally, without turning her face back to his. “It’s a kindly vampire who tucks you in and puts out the milk by your bed once he’s drunk his fill of your life.”
Her lips are red with beet-blood. He supposes his must be as well. Peter orders a second scotch.
“Are you angry, Alice? Do you hate him? I can’t think whether I should feel better or worse if you hate him. I can’t think whether I hate mine or not. I can’t think whether he is mine. I am his, that’s for certain. His, forever. A shadow that’s slipped off and roams the streets hoping to be mistaken for a human being. For a while I was so flamingly angry I thought I’d char.”
“Not angry…angry isn’t the word. Perhaps there isn’t a word. Charles came back to see me once, after that summer. I was a little older. Eleven or twelve. A little was enough. He looked at me like a stranger. Like any other young woman—a slight distaste, a tremor of existential threat, a very little current of fear. He could hardly meet my eye while I poured the tea. Like a robber returning to the scene of the crime.” She stopped watching the other woman and turned her blue eyes back to Peter. Their cold, triumphant light filled him up like a well. “He came to my window and saw that I’ d grown old and he wanted nothing more to do with me.”
Alice’s right Foot, Esq.
“You’re going to spoil it,” snapped the hare. “Oh, I know she’s going to spoil it, it always gets spoiled, just when we’re about to have it out at last.”
“I won’t spoil anything, I promise,” Olive whispered, quite out of breath.
“You can hardly help it,” sighed the wolf’s-head capital. “Any more than milk can help spoiling outside the icebox.”
“Raven was finally about to tell us how he’s like a writing-desk when you came bollocking through! I’ve been waiting eons! There’s no sense to it, you know. We’ve said a hundred answers and none of them are at all good. But he won’t say, because he’s a stupid wart. I’d advise you to tread more quietly, young lady, if you don’t want to alert the authorities.”
“What authorities? It’s only a forest inside a looking glass. The constable is hardly going to come arrest me on my way from Nowheresville to Noplace Downs.”
“The Queens’ men,” the wolf whispered. His whiskers quivered in canine fear. “All ways here belong to them.”
“Which Queen? Elizabeth? She’s all right.”
“Either of them,” answered the hare with an anxious tremor in her quartzy whiskers. “Twos are wild tonight and they’re the worst of the lot.” The pale rabbit tilted onto her side just as a real, furry hare would if it were scratching its ear with a hind leg, only the capital hadn’t any hind legs, right or left, so she just hitched up on one corner and quivered there.
“All right, I surrender,” cawed the raven’s head suddenly. “I’ll say it. But only because our Olive’s finally going places, and that deserves a present.”
“Oh, don’t be silly!” Olive demurred, though she was quite delighted by the idea. “It’s quite enough to have properly met you three at last! And to think, it would never have happened if I hadn’t gone totally harebrained just then! It was all that silver polish, I expect.”
The marble hare went very still. “I beg your pardon? What is the trouble with a hare’s brain, hm?”
“Oh, I didn’t mean anything cruel by it,” Olive said hurriedly. “It’s only that I’m…well, I’m obviously not playing with a full deck of cards this evening.”
“Only the Queen has a full deck at her command,” the marble wolf barked. “Who do you think you are?”
“Nobody!”
“Then we’ll be on our way!” The hare huffed. “There’s no point in talking to nobody, after all. People will say we’ve gone mad!”
“Oh, please don’t go! I only meant…” She looked pleadingly at the marble raven, who offered no help. “I only meant that I went mad a few minutes ago, and as I’ve only just started, I’m bound to make a mash of it at first. I’ve no doubt I’ll improve! The most dreadful sorts of people go mad; it can’t be so terribly hard. But I only ever wanted to say that darling Mr. Raven hasn’t got to give me a present, it’s present enough to make your acquaintance!”
“Would you prefer a future?” the hare asked, her pride still smarting. “It’s more splendid than the present, but you’ve got to wait three days for delivery.”
