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Alice marries Hamish. Everyone is delighted - her mother and sister and mother-in-law and father-in-law and the list goes on and on and on. Margaret even cries a little.
Her mother is, honestly, a little surprised that she went through with it. She had expected Alice to refuse after she had run off so suddenly. But Alice has learned that sometimes you have to just get the unpleasant things over with, face the dragon head on so to speak, in order to get what you want.
What does she want? She had asked herself as she had walked from the rabbit hole back to the gazebo.
She wants to go back to Underland. The only entrance to Underland that she knows is on the Ascot estate. So she lets Hamish slide the big gaudy ring onto her finger with the best smile she can muster, and thinks about being able to go Underland whenever she pleases.
Hamish doesn't look particularly happy either, but she doesn't much care about that. This is England, not Underland. In England they won't even have to see each other much after they're married. They don't even have to be faithful, look at Lowell. (Underland takes a far more sensible approach to these things, Alice thinks)
The wedding takes place in the local cathedral. It's big and expensive and fashionable, and appears in the newspapers. Her mother is almost beside herself. Her funny, odd daughter, married to the son of a lord. What bliss.
Alice smiles through all twenty hours she has to wear the ridiculous ruffled and beribboned gown that Hamish's mother and her mother had settled on. She says not one word of the funny things that pop into her head and irritate everyone around her so much. She doesn't blush, but she laughs sometimes and says as many polite things as she remembers (sometimes a little out of order).
Every now and then, she sees a blue butterfly flitting around. No one but Alice herself seems to notice it. It doesn't speak, but it doesn't have to, does it?
When Hamish falls asleep that night, she slips out of the house and down the rabbit hole into Underland. She has tea with Tarrant and Mallymkin and Thackery. She goes for long rides on the Bandersnatch with Chessur and the Tweedles. She helps Mirana with restoring the kingdom. She meets Bayard's wife and pups. Tarrant makes her a hat.
After two weeks, she climbs back up the rabbit hole and lies down to sleep in her ruffled bed in the Ascott manor. The next day, she finds the Looking Glass in her father-in-law's study. He gifts it to her the moment she expresses appreciation for it. An ancestor's memento, he says, unknown origin.
She hangs it in her own dressing room. Unknown origin, perhaps, but she wagers she knows where to find half a dozen like it.
And that is how Alice lives. By day, she is Mrs Ascott, and then later she is Lady Ascott. A quiet thing, people say, a little odd but pretty. Forgetful. By night, she is Alice, The Alice, Alice of Underland. And her nights are so much longer than her days. She really doesn't see Hamish much at all.
Instead, she lives more in Underland than England. She learns hatting from Tarrant, fencing from Mallyumkin, enchantment from Mirana and evaporation from Chessur. Bayard tries to teach her to track but she's hopeless. Just doesn't have a dog's nose.
Back in England, she does curse her sister's husband, just a little. She had kept her word and never told a soul what she had seen, for Margaret's sake. Even if she and Margaret aren't close, Margaret is still her sister and she couldn't bear to break her sister's happiness like that. Lovell (she doesn't even remember if that's his name by now) broke his vows to her sister.
It isn't a bad curse, Mirana wouldn't teach her any of those. Just to make him feel vaguely nauseous if he attempts to break a promise. It gets worse the more he tries, and if he actually breaks one he comes down with a nasty case of food poisoning. If it makes him more honest in general, well, that's just a bonus. (She makes him lose his hair a little as well, but that's just because she really doesn't like him.)
She's there on the walk when they find Tarrant's first little paper hat. She spends days in Underland by his side as he deteriorates, so long that she's almost late for the ball Hamish had been so worried about. She dives through the Looking Glass the moment Hamish doesn't need her for dancing and socialising, which doesn't take too long because he's always afraid of her saying something odd and embarrassing him.
(Sometimes it isn't even on purpose. England takes offense at such funny things she can't always predict it.)
Back in Underland, Tarrant has only gotten worse. He's lost his colour and his muchness, and he's convinced that his family are still alive.
Well. Tarrant is Alice's favourite person in England or Underland. He's always known her. He'd know his Alice anywhere. Alice leaves a hat of her own by his bedside, a funny little bonnet of feathers (and some ruffles stolen from an English gown she really had hated) and goes to steal the Chronosphere.
Is it a terrible and possibly world-ending crime? Yes. Does she care? No. It's for Tarrant. Everyone agrees that it's worth it to save their friend. If Alice has a royal decree backing her actions, that means it isn't a crime, right?
(Alice wouldn't care anyway.)
Unlike in another world, Alice is not carted off to an asylum when she escapes Time through the Looking Glass. Hamish finds her collapsed on the floor and has her sent to bed with nothing more than a sigh and a rolled eye or two. There is no enmity to have him declare her insane, just a lukewarm concern for propriety. He makes her excuses to the company in such a way that it implies future further members of the Ascott name.
She wakes up half an hour later and dives back through the Looking Glass when her maid isn't looking.
They save the Hightopps and all of Underland, and Time tells her that he is friend to no man - but then Alice isn't a man. Alice smiles and shakes his hand, and lets Tarrant lead her to meet his family. They are nice people. Much nicer than they had been when she had met them in the past. She supposes being held captive for more than a decade will do that. They have more muchness now.
Iracebeth is...nicer now? Tarrant still doesn't like her, and neither does Alice, but for Mirana's sake everyone is polite to her. Except Mallymkin and Thackery but Mallymkin and Thackery aren't polite to anyone.
Alice takes a slightly evil glee in inviting Iracebeth for tea, which Tarrant and the Hightopps also enjoy.
When she goes back to England this time, she brings with her a hat made for her by Tarrant's father, a full size version of Tarrant's first paper hat. It's simple enough to hide the hat in her bedroom. Hamish never comes in, and the maids don't mind leaving cleaning or tidying it to her.
There's a drawer full of drawings, magic aids and little trinkets from Underland that she keeps. Just to remind her that Underland is real, when England feels grey and dull and boring. The hat goes into it easily enough. She pulls it out and wears it sometimes, where no one can see.
Her first child is a boy. Lawrence Ascott, who's hair grows in as red as his father's own. Then Theresa, and the twins Margaret and Alexander. All of them as pale as their mother or as red-haired as their father.
Hamish complains to his mother that Alice will keep getting their names wrong. She uses ridiculous nicknames for all of them, as if they don't have perfectly good English names to use.
She insists on calling Lawrence, Lencot, and Theresa answers to Tyva more than her actual name. It continues with Alexander, who goes by Darex of all the ridiculous things, and his twin Margaret, whom she calls not Molly or Peg, but Agarethe. Really, it's quite unconscionable.
Hamish's mother pats his hand and tells him that as long as Alice keeps calling them by their right names in public, it doesn't much matter. (She knew Alice was a strange child going into it, but her husband had wanted to do right by Charles Kingsleigh so now they just have to make the best of it.)
Alice agrees to call the children their English names before Englishmen easily enough. She smiles at her mother-in-law and her husband with none of her teeth showing and takes tea with them. She even manages to say all of the pleasantries in almost the right order. 'Why is a raven like a writing desk' is Underlandian not English though, she thinks when both of them look blank.
Well, it explains why Tarrant likes it so much if it isn't English.
That night, she takes the children through the Looking Glass, as she has done almost every night since her first child was born and she brought him to Underland to meet her family. It's so easy to gather them in her rooms to say goodnight, and then to fall through the Looking Glass in the space of a heartbeat.
They have grown up in Underland as much as England, these children of hers. They rode on the Bandersnatch before they rode horses. They can walk through looking glasses and rabbit holes as easily as doors. Their first hats were not fussy bonnets from expensive milliners but wild creations from a Mad Hatter. They learned to take tea dodging cups thrown by a March Hare and singing nonsense nursery rhymes. Their godmother is an enchantress queen, and their mother's closest companion is a hatter.
They're really quite as mad as she is, but no one in England spends enough time with them to be able to tell. Everyone can tell in Underland, but that's alright. All the best people are.