My new name was Beatrice. I cannot recall the old name. It no longer matters.
As Beatrice I would wear a dress befitting the Queen’s Personal Maid. I hate dresses, but the pay was great. I signed my new name on the form presented to me, and so it was to be.
On my second day as Beatrice I arrived to work, and I prepared to clean her royal chambers. I assumed that would require tidying her sitting room, possibly waiting to fetch her tea or her beloved tiny cakes. The queen, for all of her airs and etiquette, was fond of the hallucinogenic bakery—so much so that she’d burned it down and offered the bakers positions in the palace as Royal Bakers.
I was wrong, of course. I arrived to find my employer naked and pacing. The room itself would take half a day to clean. Dresses, stockings, and jewelry were strewn everywhere as if she had thrown them in frustration.
“How am I to dress without my maid?” She stomped her foot, frowned at it as if it ought to make a noise even though she wore no shoe and stood on thick carpet. She picked up a book and tossed it at the wall as she stomped again. When the book made an apparently satisfying noise, she smiled at her foot.
My mouth gaped open in confusion.
“We’re all a little mad here, Beatrice,” she explained conspiratorially.
I nodded. What else was I to do?
“I need cleaning and dressing.” Alice gestured with her left hand.
Women appeared from behind curtains. They all stared at her feet as they glided forward. Each woman was laden down with some sort of bathing supply: buckets, sponges, soaps, and towels. Several slid a large tub toward the windows. None spoke.
They left after depositing the mound of supplies alongside the tub. Once they’d gone, the queen stared at me expectantly. She looked at the tub. She looked back at me. Surely, she didn’t require aid to climb into a tub.
“Your Highness?”
The Red Queen looked at me, as if my speaking was a shock.
“Shall I come back or clean now?” I gestured around the room. The clothing and jewelry that were everywhere—except in the path the tub had traveled—should have been my task as a maid.
“Beatrice, truly?” She laughed as if I were ludicrous. “I need cleaning and dressing. Are you or are you not my maid?”
Even then, I was not so unaware of her reputation. The queen’s madness was legendary. Her temper, however, was more so. I wasn’t about to risk my life if I misunderstood the way she was watching me.
“Will I be sent back to the dungeon for touching you?” I asked.
“Not today.”
“For not touching you?”
“No.” She offered me a rare, almost honest moment. “I would like you to please me, Beatrice. I selected you to do so, but there are plenty willing to look after my needs if you’re not so inclined.”
She glanced toward the curtains behind which her ladies-in-waiting stood or sat expectantly. “I have people who exist to take care of everything I seek. All volunteers. I don’t see the point in bedding the unwilling.”
I didn’t ask questions. Not about them. Not about the king. Not about anything. I simply set about doing as the queen desired. I bathed her, and I dried her. I knelt in awe as she stretched out before me on the floor. There—amidst satins and silks, diamonds and rubies, dresses and crowns—the Red Queen asked, “Love me?”
And so, I did.
Afterward, she asked, “Would you do anything I wanted?”
“No,” I lied.
She smiled, and I felt my soul shudder in fear.
“That will change,” she warned me.
I said nothing.
“You may never leave me, Beatrice.” The Red Queen gripped my hands in hers. “Even when I tell you to go, you must not leave me.”
And then she sent me to wait with the other ladies-in-waiting and summoned the king.
* * *
“I didn’t hate him,” the Red Queen says.
I’m not sure if she’s lying. I suspect this is one of the strange, precious moments of honesty that can too often be overlooked in the maze of lies and madness that make up my beloved Alice.
It doesn’t matter, though.
“Will I be finishing my days in your dungeon or meeting the executioner?” I ask.
“Must you be difficult, Beatrice?”
I smile. She only wants me because I am difficult. The hardest task in my life is finding ways to be so. If I am complacent, if she knows I’d sell my soul at her whim, she’d be bored. Alice never meant to be a queen. She chose it over expulsion from Wonderland. In essence, she chose madness over death.
The power, on the other hand, she enjoys far too much to surrender.
“Were you after my crown?” She touches her head. Today’s crown is blood ruby and onyx. Like the rest of her crowns, it’s a small circlet, so simple it could be mistaken for a headband.
No mere citizen of Wonderland may wear a crown. A “crown” is any metal or jeweled ornament that rests atop one’s head. It’s one of the gentlest rules enacted by Her Mad Majesty.
“I do not want your crown, Alice.” I keep my voice soft as we talk. The darkness makes it hard to be loud. “Nor the weight of it.”
“I see.”
“If I wanted your crown, I’d have killed you, not the king,” I point out.
“True,” she muses. “But a queen must have a king. That is a rule.”
To this, I have no answer. Wonderland is still a mystery to me. We strangers arrive here with no clue as to what it means, why us, why any of it.
“If I break the rules, I have to go back,” Alice whispers. “I can’t go back, Beatrice. I can’t. I remember enough to know that I would rather die here than return to the Original World.”
I want to hold her. When Alice is like this, lost and more frightened than mad, I want to be the knight who rescues her, the person who saves her. I killed the king. I’d do far worse for love of her.
* * *
“I hate him,” the queen told me as we were having the required afternoon tea. “I eat the little cakes and smoke the flowers to bear it.”
I brushed her hair as she spoke. It was an excuse, not the task of a maid. No one really could overrule her, though—except him. I often thought she hated him simply for that.
“He smells.” She paused and folded her hands. “He goes off to do who knows what, and I am in charge. I make all the choices. I rule. He … I’m not sure what a Red King does, but it certainly isn’t helpful.”
“Do you need help?”
I watched in the looking glass as the queen pouted. Her reflection did so sooner than the queen herself, who was sitting between my legs on the floor in a very un-royal way. Even now, however, I knew there was a level of dishonesty in her. My beloved Alice was rarely truthful unless we were both naked. Without her royal clothes, without the Red Queen’s crown, she was nearly sane. She was even honest in the way of regular folks sometimes.
“I don’t need help with anything,” Alice lied. “I can do it all myself.”
We were interrupted by the arrival of Lord Hare, which was what the pale, red-eyed man called himself these days. One of the myriad guards that roamed the Red Castle stood beyond the curtains and announced, loudly, that Lord Hare had arrived.