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The night after she defeated a Jabberwocky and didn't marry Hamish - two feats of nearly equal miraculousness - Alice slept long and deep and dreamlessly. She didn't know whether to be disappointed or relieved at the lack of dreams - to have found her sleeping self back in Underland would have been confirmation that it had only ever been a dream, and she thinks that might have broken something in her.
On the other hand, she would have been back there, and would have known she could go there as often as she pleased.
She'd been there only a few days, but that, it seemed, was more than long enough to make the entire world above smell wrong, and taste wrong, and feel wrong beneath her feet. Still, there were things to do.
Her Aunt Imogene was waiting for her in the drawing room, the maid informed her nearly as soon as she woke - had, in fact, been waiting since an ungodly hour of the morning, and would Alice kindly mention to her that it was sheer luck that anyone had even been awake to let her in? Alice winced and nodded.
Aunt Imogene was still in yesterday's dress, her hair even more disarrayed than usual, and she didn't give Alice the chance to discuss the inadvisability of walking the streets of London before the sun was even up. She didn't even bother with a greeting. "What you said to me yesterday was unkind," Imogene began, her voice so careful and so ragged that Alice could imagine it as a physical thing, tied together with fraying bits of twine.
"It was kindly meant," Alice responded, trying to keep her chin up and her back straight; she'd faced down a Jabberwocky in another world, after all, she should be able to be firm with her poor, ill aunt in this one. She sat down beside Aunt Imogene, resolved to see this through no matter how unpleasant it became.
"I'm sure it was, dear," Imogene allowed, with a watery attempt at a smile. "And you're not all wrong. Some days I'm just not here, I know that, and I haven't been as honest with you girls as I should have been, especially with you - or maybe I should say especially with your sister," Imogene said, scowling suddenly.
"With Margaret?" Alice asked, feeling a bit lost - what did Margaret have to do with Aunt Imogene's mental state?
"You think I haven't noticed what a - a cad, she married?" Imogene challenged, and if she had to search a little long for an appropriate pejorative, well, the sentiment was still all there. She sighed heavily. "I wanted you girls growing up to believe things could end well, and well, I suppose I got what I asked for in Margaret's sorry state. If the room were on fire around her, she'd brew a cup of tea and say how pleasant it was that it wasn't going cold."
Alice could only blink and gape; she had, it seemed, woefully underestimated her aunt's powers of perception. Alice had only known the truth of Lowell a day; Aunt Imogene made it sound as though she'd known for years.
"But we weren't talking of Margaret, were we?" Imogene said, giving her head a little shake. "We were talking of me, or rather of him - my fiance."
"Oh, Aunt Imogene -" Alice began sorrowfully; to see her aunt descend back into delusion after having just displayed such acuity, it only made it worse.
"He wasn't there yesterday," Imogene interrupted, proclaiming the fact in a deliberately strident tone, as if it pained her to do so.
Alice paused, holding her breath.
"It was only his emissary who I saw," Imogene continued, and Alice's hopes deflated. "And, if I'm to tell the whole truth, even he never said a word to me; scurried right on past."
"Oh, Aunt Imogene," Alice repeated.
Imogene gave her a rather sour look. "His emissary is a small white rabbit by the name of McTwisp," Imogene said sharply.
Alice blinked. Then she blinked again. The world felt a little fuzzy around the edges.
"I suppose I've given you a shock," Imogene said, sighing in a rather aggrieved way. "Well, dear, it's kindly meant."
Alice, being momentarily possessed of the great clarity that only the deeply shocked or deeply inebriated can ever achieve, had to admit to herself that she deserved that.
"I'm sorry," Alice whispered, a bit numbly; then the numbness started to wear off, and certain salient facts began to re-sort themselves into a new and horrible order in her mind. "Oh God, I'm so sorry," she repeated a moment later, and she was no longer apologizing for the same thing. The second sorry wasn't an apology at all - it was an expression of sympathy.
By the way Imogene's already sallow face drained of what little color it ever possessed, Alice guessed that she understood. Imogene folded her trembling hands together in her lap, nodding as if Alice had said a great deal more than she had - as if Alice had affirmed a suspicion long held.
"It wasn't that he couldn't marry a commoner," Imogene was saying, more to the far wall than to Alice. "They're much less particular about that sort of thing there, aren't they? But he had to marry another. Dreadful creature; little more than a child, then, who liked to follow her poor little sister around jabbing her with pins. That's all I really remember of her - well, that and her enormous head. Inbreeding, I'm sure. If she had a single redeeming quality, it was only that you really had to pity her. At least, I might have, if she hadn't been stealing the love of my life, but you see what I'm saying - she was so utterly hateful that the very idea of anyone truly caring for her was preposterous, and that is pitiable, really. If he didn't marry her, well, certainly no one else would, and then she'd be queen with no king. No equal. No one to reign her in at all. He couldn't allow that."
Imogene's eyes turned back to Alice. "She killed him, didn't she? He's dead."
"Yes," Alice said quietly.
Imogene just nodded, her gaze returning to the far wall. "I had letters from him, for a while - little notes that would pop up in the middle of a book I was reading, or just a quick hello on a street sign, that sort of thing, you know. Friendly, entirely proper letters. He was an honorable man. Then they just stopped." And Imogene's voice stopped, dropping the room into a silence as sudden and absolute and awful as the lack of letters must have been. It dragged on for what felt like it might have been years, but was probably only minutes.
"How could I tell you girls a story like that?" Imogene asked the wall. "You were children. Children are meant to believe in fairy tales. That love will make everything right in the end. But I should have told you something, when I realized where you were going - shouldn't have let you grow up thinking it was all dreams."
"She's been deposed," Alice offered, though it sounded poor and pitiful, not at all the grand victory it had been just yesterday. Imogene looked her way slowly; she wasn't weeping, as Alice thought she very well would have been, if she'd just heard that - and she couldn't even finish the thought.
The inside of her head was a great jumble of
too late
and
love
and
dead
and
sorry
and
Tarrant
, just a mad whirl of pieces of things, and Alice was frankly petrified of what she'd see when it all settled. It hadn't settled just yet, though, so she pressed on doggedly, saying, "It's a very long tale, all told, but the very simple version is that she got greedy and tried to take what was not hers, and ended losing everything. She's been banished to the Outlands with the captain of her guard who, last I saw, was trying to kill her. She's come to about the most wretched end you could imagine."
Imogene nodded along. "Good," she said, and sighed,. "I suppose you had some part in that?"
"Some part," said Alice.
"Good," Imogene repeated, sounding momentarily satisfied. Then she was quiet again. "That doesn't make him alive again, though, does it?" she murmured.
"No," Alice agreed. "Aunt Imogene, I am so, so sorry." It was about half sympathy and half apology, and the half of a smile Imogene gave her acknowledged that.
"What, I wonder, would you have done in my shoes?" Imogene asked, tilting her head at Alice.
"I've truly no idea," Alice answered.
"Rubbish," snapped Imogene. "You'd have challenged her to a duel, or poisoned her soup, something, I don't know what, but you'd have
done
something, you showed me that yesterday, unkind as you may have been about it. I'm so happy you didn't marry that simpering fop; there are better men than that in the world, Alice, this world
or
the other one. There's no need to settle for someone like
that.
I wanted you to know, now your old enough, that my problem never was lack of a prince, it was lack of - of me, I think. I don't know how else to put it - but whatever it is that I didn't have, you do."
"Muchness," said Alice, very, very softly.
"Pardon?" Imogene asked.
"A - a friend, of mine," Alice stammered, "he - he called it muchness." She could feel her cheeks heating.
And he asked me to stay,
Alice didn't add.
"What on Earth are you doing here, you silly girl?" Imogene asked bluntly. "It was one thing to come back when you were a child, any child wants her parents, but in case you haven't noticed, Alice, you're grown now."
"I - I have things here to do -" Alice tried to explain.
"What things?" scoffed Imogene. "This China business? That's your father's dream."
"Father never dreamed of going as far as China," Alice argued, trying not to sound defensive.
Imogene made a rude sound. "He would have, if he'd lived long enough. It's no matter; you've planted the idea, and I'm sure there's someone in the Ascots' employ who's been dreaming of seeing China since he was roughly the age you were when you first fell down a rabbit hole - but that someone is not you." She pinned Alice with a very pointed stare.
"Margaret -" Alice tried again.
"Does not want our interference," Imogene insisted. "I've tried."
But she thinks you're delusional,
Alice wanted to argue, but held her tongue.
Imogene just continued to glower.
"It seemed the right thing at the time," Alice finally conceded, deflating. "It seemed cowardly to stay; now it seems cowardly to have gone."
"So go back," Imogene suggested, as if it were as simple as that.
"How?" asked Alice doubtfully. "That rabbit hole is just a rabbit hole again, now. I did check."
Imogene nodded acknowledgment, then began to fiddle with something at the collar of her dress. It took Alice a moment to realize she was tugging a thin chain out from beneath the cloth. On the end of the chain hung a tiny vial. Alice felt her eyes going very, very wide, her breath stuttering with disbelief - but she wanted to believe, she realized. She wanted to believe very, very badly.
"He said the little sister made it," Imogene explained, holding the vial up before her eyes and giving it a long, unreadable look. "It was his last gift to me; he seemed to have the idea that I might some day need to escape from here to there. That someone might try to put me in a sanitarium."
She carefully twisted the little glass vial free from its top, and held it out to Alice. "Just try not to hang onto the bottle as you go," Imogene asked. "I'd like to keep it - and don't you think of protesting that its contents ought to be mine too," she added; it had indeed been on the tip of Alice's tongue to make that very objection.
"You're right," Imogene continued, "they ought to have been, but that's hung around my neck for nigh on twenty years now, and I've never used it. It's just a memory, to me, and it could be a life to you."
Alice took the vial with shaking fingers; it was obviously not Jabberwocky blood, being a clear green hue rather than milky purple. Could it work?
Well, Aunt Imogene's prince was real. Aunt Imogene had been to Wonder - to Underland.
That was only two, and it was creeping up on breakfast time. Alice brought the vial to her lips and, eyes open and head tipped back, drank it down in one gulp.
***