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The royal family of Wonderland always had only one child, and it was always a son. Thus, the Royal Jack really only had one purpose in life, and when Winston was nine years old his father divulged it to him.
The most important decision a Royal Jack ever made, his father said, was his choice of a wife.
"Wonderland has always been a matriarchy, my boy," he told him, stroking his long, gray, carefully spiraled beard impressively. "That is our lot in life. Wonderland doesn't realize how important we are as Jacks, getting the power of that choice. Choose wisely, my son, and you need never make another decision again."
Winston remembered being young and thinking Yes. Yes, I can do that.
Once he reached the marrying age of thirteen, women from all over Wonderland began to make hopeful journeys to the castle. Some of them wore low-cut dresses, some of them brought outrageous displays of their wealth, some of them even brought resumes, the mad badgers. Winston spent his early teenage years looking over all of them carefully, exhaustively, but he couldn't find the Wonderland he wanted. He wanted a Wonderland with drama, with flair, with a spark of mad ingenuity that would launch them into a new era of innovation and prosperity – and, although he never breathed a word of this to his father, Winston wanted a wife. An actual wife, someone he could love.
One day it all became rather too much for him, the sparkly dresses and the fake smiles with empty promises, so Winston made a brief escape into the gardens. No one ever thought to look for him there, strolling about the painstakingly trimmed foliage and brightly-colored roses. Yet, on that very same One Day, he turned a corner and found a girl.
She was sitting on one of the stone benches, with a deck of cards spread out in piles around her, looking like the very picture of stern concentration.
"Oh," he said. "Hello."
She looked up at him with a raised eyebrow. "Hello," she said. She had bright red hair and clear, piercing eyes, wearing a wholly unremarkable white frock, but it didn't matter. 15-year-old Winston was stunned.
"Erm—" he started, and then chastised himself for sounding so idiotic. He could hear his mother's scolding voice in his head: Inject some authority in your voice, Winston!
"This is the royal garden," he said, trying to sound as haughty and condescending as his mother often did. "What are you doing here without an escort?"
The girl shrugged and looked back down at her cards. "I got bored," she said. And she set a two of hearts on top of an ace.
Wintson's curiosity was piqued. "What are you playing?"
"Solitaire."
"Why?"
"Because I'm alone," she said, but she paused and gave him a sidelong glance. Winston could see a calculating look in her eye, and the edge of her mouth quirked up in a smile. "But I suppose I'm not anymore," she amended, quickly gathering all the cards back in her hands. "Let's do something else, then."
"P- Pardon?" Winston spluttered as the girl stood and brushed off her skirt with firm, even strokes.
"I said, let's find something to do. Just sitting here is terribly dull." She turned on her heel and walked away, through a door in the hedges. Winston watched her go, mouth clicking open and shut, shifting his weight nervously from foot to foot. He felt, really, like he aught to be doing something. Yelling at her for being without an escort, for example, or sending her to prison for insubordinate behavior, or—
Her head peeked out from beyond the edge of the doorframe. "Well," she asked impatiently, "are you coming, or not?"
"Well—well, yes! Yes, of course!" Winston stumbled slightly as he made his way across the grass toward the door, and the he could hear a disapproving sort of sniff as the girl disappeared smoothly behind its edge.
Winston tried to keep up with her short, quick steps as smoothly and authoritatively as he could, the two of them moving around a right corner, a left corner, another left, straight ahead through a fork, and over the Wax Bridge to find themselves in a small, open clearing within the maze.
"Tell me you didn't want to come here." Winston asked, voice dripping with disdain. "This is the hedgehog breeding ground, nobody ever comes here."
"Grab a hedgehog," was all she said, looking down at the balls of fluff at their feet thoughtfully. She kicked a small green one out her way, bending over to pick up a red one roughly the size of a grapefruit.
"I'm not picking up a hedgehog," Winston huffed. "They're only here to hunt the Rose-Eating Blorfbugs—"
"Royal Jack Winston," the girl said, and his mouth snapped shut as she looked at him with those piercing eyes. "Sir," she amended with the tiniest, quickest curtsy Winston had ever seen, "Pick up a dratted hedgehog, it's not that difficult!"
He picked up the green one.
They took a left out of the clearing, another left, two rights, a wrong, and circled around the Blowfish Tree three times clockwise until they arrived at the Flamingo Gardens. By now, Winston's hedgehog had begun to struggle slightly, bored of being held. He set it down on the ground, the girl doing the same. He stood and watched as she placed her hands on her hips, surveying the flamingoes carefully, before striding up to one and staring at it straight in the eye.
Winston started to feel slightly alarmed. These Flamingoes were kept here in the middle of the gardens for a reason; The Queen loved their bright colors and aggressive attitudes, wanting them to run around the Palace Yard like guard dogs, but they had pecked the eyeballs out of so many Gardening Spades that they'd had to be contained.
But before he could say a word, the girl had placed both of her hands at the flamingo's neck, stretching one hand up to the base of the head, ruffling its feathers considerably and straightening out its neck with a loud, strangled squawk. "Stay," she commanded clearly.
It did.
Winston watched, with wide eyes, as the girl tucked the flamingo under her arm, took careful aim at the hedgehog rolled up obediently at her feet, and whacked it clear through a small arch of rose leaves in the distance, only inches away from a stick stubbornly poking its way out of the ground. "There," she said, shifting the flamingo under her arm. "Just like that. You do play croquet, I presume?"
Well, yes, of course he had – but Winston had never seen anything like this in his life. He gaped at her. "Who taught you to do this?" he asked.
"No one," she said, tucking a stray piece of hair behind her ear. "I did it myself. These flamingoes aren't all that difficult to train, it just takes a firm hand, you know. Once they know you're in charge, they're quite useful." She looked up at him and her mouth twisted sharply at his gaze so fixed upon her. "What are you staring at?"
He had been re-examining her carefully from where he stood, from top to toe, as though this were an entirely new specimen of creature never before encountered by mankind. Tiny little feet in patent slippers, a white frock with a small grass stain at the hem, not a lithe figure but certainly not a fat one either, and pale skin without a single freckle to be seen. In fact, everything about this girl was wholly unremarkable except for her lurid red hair and her razor-sharp eyes of chrystalline blue.
Not to mention the flamingo that Winston had seen, not even a month ago, chase a Gardening Spade in circles around the castle for nearly four hours, now tucked peacefully under her arm as though it were a trained dog.
"What was your name, again?" he asked.
"I didn't give it," she told him with an amused raise of her eyebrow. "I am Mary Elizabeth Constance Devilius. At your service, sir." She added the last little bit with a mutter and another short curtsy.
Winston made a face. "That's your full name, is it? Well, I'm not going to call you all that."
"Why not?" she challenged. "It is my full name."
"I am the Royal Jack, I can call you whatever I like!"
"But you can't take my name from me, it's all I've got!"
They stared at each other for a moment. She reached to tuck her hair behind her ear again, even though not a hair had fallen out of place.
"What do you mean," Winston tried, his voice much quieter now, "when you say it's all you've got?"
"Fine," the girl said rather snappishly, completely ignoring his question with an evil glint brightening her eye. "Sir Royal Jack, if you can hit my hedgehog with your hedgehog, then you may call me Mary."
He took in the arrogant smirk on her face, foot tapping the grass softly, her flamingo still tucked docilely under her arm.
His hedgehog had already begun to crawl away.
Winston walked over, picked up his hedgehog, and waved the green ball of fuzz in her general direction. "Deal," he said.
Putting his hedgehog on the ground, he walked over to the nearest group of flamingoes. Most of them scattered at his approach and hopped away, but one of them drinking deeply from a fountain didn't notice him coming. Winston stood behind the bird, trying to remember how he'd seen the girl do it. Authority, she'd said. His mother's words echoed suddenly around the inside of his head, "Authority, Winston!", and he winced, straightening his shoulders.
Just got to show him who's boss, he thought.
Winston walked over to the flamingo's side, and before the bird had finished raising its head from the fountain he'd gripped the base of its neck with both hands. The bird squawked loudly and began to struggle, wings flapping feebly and feet stomping the ground, but Winston held on fast, determined not to look behind him at the mischievous glee he was sure was on the girl's face. if I don't do this, he thought, She'll never respect me, ever.
He gritted his teeth and slid one hand firmly up the flamingo's neck, looking at it dead in the eye as it squawked horribly. "Stay."
For one horrible second, he thought it might just ignore him and peck out his eyes instead. But… it stayed.
Suddenly flooded with confidence, Winston shook out the tension in his upper shoulders and poked his hedgehog with his foot, encouraging it to roll back up into a ball. He gripped the flamingo firmly under his arm and took aim like his croquet instructor had always told him to. Quick, smart, and sure, he brought back the flamingo's head and whacked the hedgehog firmly. It tumbled, head over paws, through the little arch of leaves. Winston watched with growing astonishment as it smacked the girl's hedgehog, nudging it just exactly enough to tap the stick firmly.
Winston and the girl looked at each other, and at the sour expression on her face, the pride threatening to bust its way out of Winston's chest faltered slightly. He hadn't meant to upset her.
"Looks like you won," he tried.
It worked. Her scowl immediately shifted into a pleased smile. "I suppose I did," she said.
"Or," Winston chanced, holding out his arm, "we both did."
She gave him that queer look again, the one out of the corner of her eye as though she were measuring him up, trying to figure him out. Winston waited, heart fluttering.
"Indeed," she said, looping her arm through the crook of his offered one. "Teamwork, you know. I've never tried it before, but I suppose I can't argue with the results." She gave him a blinding smile, her eyes shining and red lips parting ever-so-slightly.
Mary, he thought. Her name is Mary.
15-year-old Royal Jack Winston was in love.
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