Well, I really don't have an excuse for not updating this for the better half of a decade...but have no fear! It is here! This chapter's been sitting, motheaten, on my computer for a while, because it was one of the first scenes I actually wrote for Golden Afternoons. It's kinda what inspired everything, you know? So here it is, the birth of an idea... Here's a hankie for ye.

And on the off-note, I really do like Bert. A lot. He fills me with warm fuzziness every time I write him. So forgive me for being partial to an chimney sweep!


Chapter 6
The Hounds and the Chase

Alice bade Lorane goodbye as she went to sit at her assigned table. The dinner party was beautiful—candles lit the tables, and three great chandeliers reflected the lukewarm light in their crystals like icicles at dusk. She made her way around the rows of round tables to number twenty-seven. It was in the middle of the ballroom, surrounded by all the other girls at the Marionette's school. Most of their parents were already there, and the girls raced to their fathers and mothers with outstretched arms. There was laughing, and hugging, and crying. Mothers dabbed at their daughters' tear-streaked faces before dabbing their own, and Fathers kissed their children on the cheek and gave them loving noogies.

Alice watched, enraptured. So much good was welling up in the small ballroom. So much laughter and smiles and cheer that she couldn't help but to smile herself. She sat down in one of the three empty chairs at her table—the middle one—and waited patiently for her happiness too.

Her mother had said they'd be there.

Her mother had promised, and had written that they were looking forward to it.

For once, Alice was finally excited to see her father. She wanted to grapple him around the neck and never let go. She wanted to bury her head into her mother's bosom like she did when she was little and smell her perfumes of honey and lavender.

She waited patiently with her hands in her lap.

Waiters were ushered out. They took orders, and disappeared again. They didn't stop by her table.

As the dinner dragged on, Alice began to squirm. She looked over her shoulder, and in the corner of the room was Lorane. She was sitting alone too, but then again Lorane's parents were never fond of her.

"Of course they won't come," Lorane had told Alice on the carriage ride. "They have more important things to do or something… it's always an excuse with them, you know."

"My parents are coming," Alice had told her gleefully. "Mother's excited. She wrote that she wanted to give me a present when she comes! I wonder what it is?"

Lorane smiled. "A new dress, perhaps?"

They laughed.

But now Alice wasn't laughing. She was twirling her fork on the table; her shoulders slumped, thinking that they had forgotten about her, too.

Halfway through the main course, there was finally movement at the door. Alice perked—they must have finally arrived! Now that she thought about it, her father did have a knack for always being absentminded and tardy. "He must have just forgotten," she told herself promptly, and quickly put her fork into the rolled napkin again. Her hands shook with excitement.

Oh Alice…

Oh poor innocent Alice.

What can we do, Hatter?

I do not know, my friend.

We have to do something!

She's not in Wonderland anymore, Rabbit.

The door opened to the constable. He was rain-soaked, and dower. Fear replaced excitement, and she sought to control it. Madame Gazelle hurried to the constable's side, and they went out of the dining room.

Alice—even in her innocence—knew that deep down, something terrible was tumbling down on her.

I won't let her go through this alone!

What choice do we have, Rabbit?

Hatter, she is just a child!

She's a young lady. Even you yourself agreed that it's high time that she wakes up and smells the daisies.

B-B-But—But—!

The constable came back in with Madam Gazelle. She pointed at Alice.

All of a sudden, the pillars broke. Everything came tumbling down like an avalanche—fear, hope, excitement, and heartbreak. It came down like hail and washed through her like black rain.

A ringing in her ears, above the crumbling, crumbling world and the soft whispers of black rain came—so familiar and warm and welcoming, reminiscent of golden afternoons slipping through her fingers like sand.

Then I will grow up with her.

She tilted her head back and gulped down the sob lodged in her throat, and blinked away the tears brimming in her cloudless blue eyes. She forced her weakness back. She pursed her lips and kept her world steady. She kept herself afloat—barely breathing.

I am here for you, Alice.

One voice in the gloom—strengthening, fleshing, becoming whole and hope. Like the colors that used to flitter in the corners of her eyes.

We are here, Alice.

More voices to help stop the tears. To steel her and make her immune to heartbreak, to tie her heart together with red fate-string and keep it together just long enough for it to heal.

They were voice against death.

Against disaster and loss.

Against cold spring nights and snow-filled summers.

Against moonless skies.

Against rainless clouds.

Small voices, too insignificant before, finally being heard through the colors in the corners of her eyes. Promising—but failing, because they were not there with her when the constable arrived at her table. They were not there with her when he sat down and enveloped her tiny hands in his large ones and told her in a tender voice as if she was a delicate porcelain doll,

"Miss Pleasance, will you please come with me?"

The voices and their owners were not there to comfort her when she stood and followed the constable out of the dining hall, as the other young ladies watched and whispered, and each footstep cracking another part of her world. No one was there for poor Alice Pleasance when she took that step out of the door. Even Lorane stayed in the corner of the room, too helpless to move and too afraid to stray her eyes from her bowl of potato soup.

Dormouse, what's wrong?

What can I do, Hatter? What could I possibly do?

And Alice forgave her, because she knew she couldn't be saved from it. She knew that even though she had been stripped of her golden afternoons, that even when she had been forced to the Marionette school, she had not grown up. She had merely decided to put away the thoughts of golden afternoons for brighter days, but as she stepped out into the foyer, and heard the door close behind her, she knew that she would never love those golden afternoons ever again.

Young Alice had grown up by the time the constable knelt down to her again, and patted her shoulder comfortingly. She was not a child any longer, and the color would forever be trapped in the corners of her eyes, always there but never reachable.

And just like that, the voices—in all their childhood warmth and glory and presence—faded into the cold winter draft that blew through the foyer.

Alice stood against the constable alone, and was told in a deep and sorrowful voice that her parents would not be coming tonight.

"Yes they are," she whispered vehemently, and took a defiant step away from the constable. "They'll be here! Mother promised!"

The burly policeman set his jaw. He had thought she would accept it, but he'd seen other children who didn't. He came closer again and told her sternly, "Young miss, do not raise your voice."

"Raise my voice?" her voice was rising—thundering out of her throat like a tidal of hysteria. "I am not causing any trouble! I want my parents!"

"Miss, lower your voice."

"I may talk as loud as I very well please!"

He reached out to secure her shoulder. "Miss Pleasance—"

The young woman wrenched away from him, and gathered her dress in her hands. "My parents are dead and you are telling me not to mourn?" she screamed. "Are you even human?!"

When the constable opened his mouth to respond, Alice didn't let him. She bolted for the front door, and raced down the steps into the rain. She ran—she didn't know where she was going, or what she was going to do after she stopped, but she ran anyway. Through puddles and streams—drenching her leather boots and dampening her bloomers. Rain soaked her face, and her hair stuck to her face. The rain was cold and heavy, but she didn't care. She ran with all her might.

She ran from the hounds of death that pursued her, and would—when she would finally stop to catch her breath—finally catch her and gobble her up into their stomachs of despair.

She thought she could outrun the tears that burned in her eyes. She thought she could run back through time. But she couldn't, and when she did finally stop, it was back where she began—at the empty Marionette School for Young Ladies.

There was a clingy fog that began to droop over London. The hounds of death caught her through them, and indeed gobbled her up, and left her silent and alone on a vacant street.

Finally, she released the folds in her dress and slumped down on the front steps. The tears that burned in her eyes broke, and ran in crystal streams down her soaked face. She didn't cry quietly either.

"Young ladies do not show their feelings. They cry silently and delicately," Madam Gazelle had instructed when Alice had first arrived and the Madam had found her crying in a corner of her room. "Young ladies do not show emotions. We women are the pillars of mankind."

But Alice was far from a pillar. She was only girl—a small, quiet girl—and now an orphan.

So she cried aloud. She wailed and sobbed and wished she had someone to cry into. She sat on the steps and put her head back, and let the grief that cracked and crumbled her world take her.

And then, after eons in the cold lonesome rain, there were footsteps. There was a comfort who pressed her head into his chest and told her it was going to be OK.

"I'm sorry I'm late," Bert whispered.

Alice buried her head into his chest, her ear pressed against the ticking pocket watch in his coat—she had somehow always known it was there without ever having seen or heard it—and wrapped her arms around him. He let her finish crying. He let her go raw and tired, and he kissed her forehead when she had finally gone silent.

She looked up into his wet face. "Do I know you from somewhere?"

"Ah, from here and yonder, for sure," he said in good humor, but he knew what she really meant.

"No, I mean before…before…"

He set his chin on her head and rubbed her back soothingly. "You've known me all along, Mary-Anne."

In reply, she only tightened her hug around his waist, and listened to the watch tick, tick, tick to the steadiness of his heartbeat. Yes, she knew. She had known from the beginning.

The pair sat on the steps of the Marionette School for Young Ladies, draped in rain and fog and grief, until the lampposts were lit with bright orange flames, and the air crackled with clops of horses and carriages, and young girls returning from a wonderful night. Alice looked at the steady procession of carriages as they stopped at the streetside, and by then Bert had gone.

Madam Gazelle dismounted out of the first carriage, gathered the folds of her dark green dress in her hands, and clipped up to Alice Pleasance. "You found your way home," was the old crone's exact words. Not belittling, and not sneering. A fact.

Alice curtsied in reply.

"Heidi has a hot cup of tea for me every night. I will meet with you in my office after I have sent the other girls to bed. Understood?"

Alice silently nodded.

Madam Gazelle brushed past her, and ordered the young girls to quit doddling and hurry in out of the chill. She didn't say another word to Alice. But then again she didn't need to. She trailed in after the girls and their whispers, and was the last one inside.

Hey, Mary-Anne.

She looked over her shoulder as she stopped in the doorway, and spied a shadow on the street. "White Rabbit," she whispered aloud, and it gave her some sort of silly reassurance. It gave her the strength to close the door behind her, and go into Madam Gazelle's office where a hot cup of tea waited. She helped herself to it with shaking hands, and sipped it as it brought life back into her shivering fingers and toes, and warmed the spot in her stomach that felt like cold lead.

"I'm not alone," she told the cup of tea. "I'm not alone."


And here is churning, turning, or ending point? Ah, who knows?