“We’ll miss teatime,” Mark Hare says as he stares into his teacup.
“Hush, dear. It’s always a grand time to have tea!” His companion, oddly, is a stranger to me—or at least I think he is. A ridiculous hat, oversized and garish, perches on his head and obscures his face. In the dim light of the dungeon, I would venture to say that the hat is puce, but I suppose it might be eggplant. I’m certain it’s not brown. Nothing quite so ordinary as brown will do for any of the natives of Wonderland.
Mark, whom I only know because he is a lesser cousin of Lord Hare and has been lingering around the palace far too often, leans on the wall beside my cell and tosses his teacup over his shoulder. “Clean cup, if you please.”
From the shadows a pale, shaking hand reaches out with a cup of tea in a saucer. Tea sloshes over the sides of the cup.
“Without any biscuits?” his hatted companion asks in a tone that can only be called scandalized. “You barbarian! You … you … animal.”
Mark flashes teeth in the sort of smile that is more feral than not and says, “Hop, hop.”
The hatted man tsks at him—and then at me. “Eavesdropping. Quite the worst sort of behavior, you know.”
“Worse than lacking biscuits?” I ask.
The men both hum and mutter, lost easily in a curious sort of riddling that the Wonderlandians are prone to. Mark taps a finger on the teacup, sloshing the liquid over the edges in a rhythmic way. The hatted man paces and has a little chat with himself. Suddenly, as if responding to signal that I missed, they both say in unison, “Quite so!”
I nod. Really, what else could I do? For all the ways that being here changes a woman, at the heart of it all, I am still me. I see no need to engage more nonsense or nuisance than necessary. Mark and the hatted man are not rational; few of the inhabitants of this place are. In truth, I rather like it. A bit of madness makes the things that one must do seem sane sometimes.
At least that’s my theory.
Mark watches me as he holds out a hand and demands, “Biscuit!”
The same pale, quivering hand as before extends. This time it holds a biscuit. A key-shaped biscuit is placed gently onto his open palm.
Mark extends the key-biscuit to me almost the moment it touches his palm. “Will you have tea with us, Beatrice?”
“Indeed,” I murmur with as much enthusiasm as I can.
He hands me the key-biscuit and … waits. No instructions. No anything.
“What do I do with a biscuit?”
“Marvelous riddle!” the hatted man exclaims with a clap. He claps several more times, muttering a series of queries that my question has sparked as he begins to pace. “A biscuit … What does a biscuit do? What is a biscuit?”
“Does it signify?” Mark asks.
“A biscuit?”
“A biscuit,” Mark confirms with a nod.
As they pace and ponder, I decide that there are—as happens regularly in this weird world—only a few choices. One, I eat the biscuit. Two, I see if the biscuit is a key. Three, I do nothing. I’m not great at nothing, and I have been starving since I was left to rot in Alice’s dungeon. On the other hand, if it failed as a key, I could eat the rest.
“Key it is.”
I reach between the bars of my cell with the biscuit key, shove it in the lock as carefully as one can with a biscuit, and try to turn it. Baked brown pastry flakes to the ground. Inside the key-biscuit is an actual key, solid, metal, and effectively granting my freedom. The lock turns.
“She said you’d know!” the hatted man exclaims. “She said it true.”
Mark looks at me, shrugs, and smiles.
I shove the door open with a squeak and screech—not the door’s sounds, mind you. Mark Hare and his awkward hat-wearing companion provide sound effects as the door opens.
The dilemma, unfortunately, is what to do next. Leaving the cell or-- No, there is no dilemma. I love Alice, cherish her in a way that a fish loves water or an oyster hides a pearl or any number of explanations. The point is that she is both essential and my treasure.
But I do not want to die. I’ve held on to my head despite everything. This time, perhaps, I will not evade the executioner unless I leave. Then I might literally evade him. It is my best hope.
* * *
The king is a pig. Some days I thought he might become so in form. He is a bore, a vulgar, rutting thing, voracious in appetite. In so many ways, the Red King is porcine. Yet Alice titters and laughs when he makes crude jokes. She pats his cheeks. She ruffles his hair.
I hate him.
“I don’t want a brat,” Alice exclaims as I rub oil into her skin. “If he continues as he does, I’ll be fat and mad.”
“Plenty of women—”
“What if I get sent back?” Alice asks softly. She is prone under me, belly down on her bed, naked but for another pair of absurd shoes and a jagged crown crookedly affixed atop her head. “What if I have a child, a native of this place, and I get sent home?”
I cannot tell her she won’t. None of us who’ve fallen into this world know when our time will suddenly end. In full truth, I wonder sometimes if we are all in a shared coma, or if we are dead, or highly medicated. There have been times in my life when injury, death, and medication were all likely.
“I don’t want him to touch me,” Alice admits. “Even if I wanted a squalling infant, I wouldn’t want him to touch me.”
“He’s the king. Shouldn’t you … want him, or whatever?” I’m not completely clear on how the Wonderland things work, but if he wants the queen—every queen regardless of the woman under the crown—shouldn’t she want him, too?
“I’ve tried,” Alice says, almost calmly.
Then, she screams. Once. Twice. Several more times. She’s still on her stomach, naked under me.
Guards come. A knight, tall and polished and far more dignified than most of the people here, enters the room.
“Are you in danger, m’lady?”
“Every day,” Alice says. “Bring me something to please me. Plan a ball. Find me a new dress. Burn it all down.”
“Your Majesty?” the knight asks.
The Red Queen stands, spilling me to the floor in her fit of temper. Two ladies-in-waiting begin to dress her. No one is surprised by her fits or moods. She stares at them all, gaze fixated on the knight.
“You. Come at midnight.”
He says nothing, simply bows and leaves.
I wonder at the plan she has in mind, but Alice answers me before I ask: “Perhaps if I watch him rut with you—”
“No.”
“I cannot stand the king’s touch,” she says. “If I am aroused—”
“No, Ally.”
“What am I to do?” She looks lost, the confused girl who sometimes peers out of the mad queen’s eyes stares at me.
“I’ll fix it.” I know before the next heartbeat that my plan is deadly, that there are no answers here that will not result in disaster. However, for my queen, there are no lines I cannot step beyond. She is my life.
I have killed for far less rational reasons.
“Tonight?” Alice looks as if she’s holding her breath.
I nod and think of my options. I have a king to kill, and there are no guns in Wonderland. It’s messier without the slick, simple finality of a bullet. Simple maids have no need of sharp knives or swords, but there was a knight here moments ago.