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.
CHAPTER 22
H ATTER PUT one foot in the puddle, but the sole of his shoe never touched the bottom. He tumbled down, falling deeper and deeper until he stopped and floated in the depths, only to shoot up again as fast as his descent had been. When he broke the surface, he was in the Pool of Tears.
The clouds above swirled violently and the water was rough and choppy. He swam to the crystal shore, his senses alive to any sign of Redd or her hordes. He climbed out of the water and stealthily approached the nearest tree-a beaten old thing with a scarred trunk and leafless, craggy branches.
“Has Princess Alyss returned to Wonderland? Have you seen her come out of the pool?”
“Princess Alyss is dead!” the tree said loudly, as if for the benefit of an unseen but all-hearing force liable to inflict great hurt at the slightest provocation.
“I have no evidence of her death.”
“Princess Alyss Heart is dead!” the tree said louder than ever, but added in a whisper, “Redd’s Glass
Eyes are everywhere. It’s dangerous to talk. The princess has not returned.”
Hatter didn’t know what the Glass Eyes were-Redd had only recently unleashed them on the queendom-but he wasn’t going to stick around to find out. As long as he had strength in him, his duty dictated that he return to the other world and search for the princess. He would find her, train her in the ways of a warrior queen, as he had her mother; then they could both come home to face plenty of trouble, the Glass Eyes being only part of it.
He dived back into the Pool of Tears, the gravity of the portal-already growing more familiar to him-pulling him down. Likewise more familiar to him was the pause in the deep, the momentary suspension, followed by the heart-in-mouth feeling as he rocketed up and out of a puddle behind a milking shed on the outskirts of Budapest, Hungary. Three unimpressed goats were the only earthly creatures to see the figure twirl out of a sun-scorched puddle and land confidently on his feet.
Hatter wondered whether he could learn to navigate the Pool of Tears as he did the Crystal Continuum, so that he might be able to choose his earthly destination. Control would be more difficult to attain than it was in the Continuum. Water was a heavy medium; to maneuver in it would require skill, balance, endurance, strength of body and mind. But these were considerations for another day, another year, because Hatter’s worldwide search for Alyss now began in earnest.
He trailed people alight with the glow of imagination, believing that one of them would lead him to
Wonderland’s princess, who couldn’t fail to glow in this world.
He visited hat shops in the towns and cities of Spain, Portugal, Belgium, Switzerland, Austria, Bavaria, Italy, Prussia, Greece, Poland (to name but several). In 1864, five years into his search, having twice
circled the European continent, he took the Calais ferry to Dover, England. Had Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland been published by the time he arrived, any one of the salespeople in the hat shops and haberdasheries he visited would have been stung with recognition upon hearing the name Princess Alyss Heart of Wonderland issue from his lips, though they might have thought him mad-a man in search of a fictional character. As it was, they only tried to sell him hats he didn’t need while complimenting him on the one he wore. Hatter would be far from England a year later when Charles Dodgson’s book was first published.
As he roamed the world in search of Wonderland’s princess, maps sticking out of every available pocket, worn from use and much scribbled on with notes of where he’d been and what routes he’d taken, Hatter’s legend grew. Though the languages in which it was told varied as widely as the terrain he covered-ranging from Afrikaans to Hindi to Japanese to Welsh-and the details of the story often changed, its basic premise was the same: A solitary man blessed with fear some physical abilities and armed with a curious assemblage of weaponry crossed continents on a mysterious quest that led him to
headwear merchants the world over-whether a peddler of knitted caps operating from a tent in a North
African Bedouin encampment or an exclusive hat shop in the heart of Prague.
Hatter sightings were reported in America, which was nearing the end of a civil war-glimpses of him stalking streets in New York and Massachusetts, tramping the snow-covered hills of Vermont, the icy roads of Delaware, Rhode Island, New Hampshire, and Maine. He traveled down through Mexico and South America, skirted the Antarctic Peninsula, and circled back up to California and Oregon. He passed into Canada and eventually made his way to the Asian countries and the Far East.