Bargain price

CHAPTER 20

H ATTER MADIGAN left Paris within thirty-two hours of escaping the Palais de Justice and scoured

the country in search of Alyss. After weeks of fruitless searching, he arrived in the principality of Monaco on the Mediterranean coast. It was mid-August, the peak of summer. He hadn’t yet visited a single hat shop when he was walking down a side street near the beach and heard a passing gentleman exclaim to a companion, “Ah, regardes cela! Pauvre petit chapeau haut-de-forme!”

Hatter had picked up enough French to know that chapeau meant “hat.” As the men continued on their

way, he turned for a glimpse of the headwear in question and saw a top hat floating in the middle of a puddle. He knew in a moment; it was his hat. How had it gotten there? Hatter examined the puddle. It should have been evaporating in the heat, but he could tell by its edges that it wasn’t. An evaporating puddle would have had a ring of damp around it, indicating its original size before the effects of the sun.

Hatter had studied his share of puddles during his time in this world, wondering which of them, if any, might take him back to Wonderland once he was reunited with Princess Alyss. There had been nothing telltale about any of them, nothing signifying their use as a return portal. But this one…careful not to step

in it, he bent down and picked up the hat. It was soaked but it looked all right. He flicked his wrist. There they were, the S-shaped blades. So the weapon still worked. With another wrist-flick, the blades morphed back into a dripping top hat, which Hatter put on his head, tapping the crown as might a dandy adding the final touch to his wardrobe before heading out for a night of frolic and fun. As a test, Hatter picked up a stone and dropped it into the puddle.

Ker-whoosh!

The water sucked it down and out of sight.

Could this be a return portal? Might the Pool of Tears, the only means out of Wonderland, have many return portals, various portal routes connecting to it like tentacles to the head of an octopus? And what if Alyss had discovered one of them-a puddle situated where no water should naturally have been-and traveled back to Wonderland? It was unlikely, since no one who’d entered the Pool of Tears had ever yet returned. But Alyss was not your average Pool of Tears traveler. She wasn’t average in anything. If she had returned, she would not survive long. She didn’t have the training, her imaginative muscle unexercised, and Redd wouldn’t stand for it.

Hatter flattened his top hat into blades, aligning them in a stack to make them as compact as possible. He tucked the weapon into a secure, thick-lined pocket inside his coat; he had no intention of losing it again.

But what if his theory was wrong? What if this puddle led to some unknown destination instead of back to Wonderland? Stepping into it was a serious risk. For Alyss’ sake, and for that of the queendom, it was one he had to take.

A FTER THE temper subsides and one has a moment to calmly reflect, it isn’t uncommon for declarations shouted in a fit of rage to strike one as untrue, and because they may have been hurtful to family, friends, lovers, husbands, or wives, one wishes them unsaid. But this was not the case with eleven-year-old Alyss Heart, who had waited with impatience for the Reverend Charles Dodgson to complete the book describing her life in Wonderland, all the while entertaining visions of comeuppance for those who’d doubted her. When Dodgson at last presented her with a copy of the book during a picnic of cold chicken and salad along the river Cherwell, and she discovered that it had little to do with her and that he’d purposely twisted everything she’d told him into nonsense-How could he? A vicious

joke!-anger filled her to the tips of her fingers. If her talk of Wonderland wasn’t fantasy, it might as well have been, for all the hurt and trouble it had caused her.

She meant exactly what she said and never once, in all the years afterward, regretted it.

“You’re the cruelest man I’ve ever met, Mr. Dodgson, and if you had believed a single word I told you, you’d know how very cruel that is! I never want to see you again! Never, never, never!”

She left Dodgson on the riverbank, perplexed, and ran the entire way home. She stomped into the hall

and slammed the door behind her, surprising Mrs. Liddell. “What, back already?”

But Alyss-her face twisted with grief and rage-didn’t stop. A cruel, vicious man! What am I supposed to do now? Can’t live as Odd Alice. She took the stairs two at a time up to her room and locked the door.

“Alice?” Mrs. Liddell called, following her. “Where are Edith and Lorina? Where’s Mr. Dodgson? What’s happened?”

But Alyss wouldn’t say, nor would she come out of her room. She didn’t hear Mrs. Liddell knocking at the door, the annoyed but futile turning of the doorknob, or the imperious demand: “Alice, open this door. Open it this minute.” The blood roared in her veins and suddenly she was ripping the drawings of Heart Palace off her walls a fistful at a time, tearing them into confetti. No more. Erase it all. I will no longer be Odd Alice. Odd Alice must die. Yes, it was a solution: Give up her so-called ridiculous,

fantastical delusions and enter wholeheartedly into the world around her. Become just like everyone else. Listen.

Mrs. Liddell was no longer accosting the door to her room. She heard voices downstairs. Dodgson and her sisters must have returned. The beastly man!

“Alice, come downstairs!” Mrs. Liddell called. “Mr. Dodgson is here!” “I won’t see him!”

Thinking afresh on what he’d done, remembering the feel of his idiotic book in her hands, she became enraged all over again-He tricked me! A man with a heart of ice!-and kicked at the heaps of confetti lying on the floor. What was-? Something had moved in the looking glass: not a reflection of herself, of anything in the room. No! It was Genevieve, dressed as Alyss last remembered her, but without her crown.

“Never forget who you are, Alyss,” Genevieve said.

“Shut up!” Alyss cried, and threw a pillow at the looking glass.

Her mother-or whoever the woman in the mirror was-had never been through what she’d had to deal with these last four years. The mirror was suddenly empty, reflecting only the room. But of course

nobody had been in the mirror. How stupid! Her imagination had been playing tricks on her.

Exhausted, Alyss dropped to the floor, sobbing. Before long, she fell asleep amidst the scraps of paper palaces. When she emerged from her room the next morning-a room perfectly clean, no confetti on the floor, no sign of the violence done to it hours earlier-the Liddells were at breakfast in the dining room. They immediately noticed a change in Alyss without being able to pinpoint what it was. Edith and Lorina fell still, mid-chew, their open mouths revealing a mash of scrambled egg. Dean Liddell paused in the midst of buttering his scone, and Mrs. Liddell continued pouring tea into her cup even after it spilled over onto the saucer. Not until the servant started to clean it up did she notice what she’d done.

“You’re wearing the dress,” Mrs. Liddell said. The dress she had purchased months before but which

Alyss had always refused to wear because she feared it would make her appear common. “Yes, Mother.”

But that wasn’t it, didn’t account for the change. “You look…rather lovely,” said Dean Liddell. “Thank you, Father.”

The change was in subtler things-the tilt of Alyss’ head, the particular sweep of her arms, her careful steps forward. The Liddells were so taken with her appearance that they failed to realize it was the first time she had ever called them by those most intimate of endearments: Mother and Father.