Thanks to everyone for making the road to more updates smoother by paving it with kind reviews—they make excellent motivation.
Here are some clues: Kingdom of Ingary, a video game, a famous Invasion song. In the last chapter Alice told the story part of a famous opera that was never finished because its composer died suddenly—your guesses are encouraged. For those of you who recognized the princesses, well done!
Let us go singing as far as we go: the road will be less tedious.
Virgil
As the sun's reflection over the curvature of the landscape made its final curtain call, crickets began tuning for their nightly symphony, and the trees rustled with the sound of birds tucking up for an evening's repose. Before the Chair could strike its first A, however, a rich and round voice echoed throughout, singing quite unabashedly and without fear of judgement unto itself. The crickets fell perfectly but momentarily silent out of stunned respect, as if an operatic genius had maddeningly decided to begin the performance before the crowd was fully seated.
"And if you remain callous and obdurate, I
Shall perish as he did, and you will know why!
Though I probably shall not exCLAIM as I die--"
There was an unnatural gap in the tune as the Hatter stopped where he was and gestured toward Alice very theatrically, moving both arms in a great sweep as if to catch her from a terrific fall. Seeing her cross her arms over her chest and look off into the trees, he frowned and cleared his throat rather obviously. Despite his annoyance, the situation did call for certain measures of subtlety.
"There is another line, you see," he suggested.
"I'll not go on, it isn't proper."
"Very well, then, neither shall I." He mimiced her defiant stance, pretending to stare off into the woods haughtily but glancing at her every few seconds. "I am fully capable of standing here all night, you see, I can sleep with my eyes open." Ah. He held the trump card. Being late to a reception in court would be unparalleled disaster, and so Alice weighed her options carefully. She could either strike out on a dim path to some royal house she had never been to in a strange and unforgiving land, or remain with her increasingly irritating companion and endure—well, not so much endure his singing, which was not unpleasant—endure being forced to sing the response to every silly verse he could come up with. And his knowledge was infinite, it seemed. She had sung everything from obscure school hymns to bawdy tunes she dared not concentrate on too lengthily.
The whole thing was most unbecoming, even if they were alone—which, come to think of it, was even more inappropriate. Acting as the Hatter's Chorus was of immediate importance, however, in the current situation. She ticked a diagonal in the box marked "Sing" and chose her fate with a sigh. The Hatter plucked himself from a glazed stare, apparently demonstrating his open-eyed sleeping talent, to look gleefully anticipant, beyond what her abilities really ought to have yielded from an audience. Alice was not in a singing mood, even if it was light opera, and so the lyric came out for the ninth time in a flat, monotonic utterance instead of the philosophical tone for which it was intended.
"Willow. Titwillow. Titwillow." He was thrilled at the completion of the piece, applauding them both by muffled glove.
"There, you see? The ear detects some misgivings on your part, but I think I was incandescent; the trees cry out for an encore! Seventeen encores!" They were not crying out for anything, and his supporting soprano (or at least he rather supposed she was, she could be awfully shrieky at times—he really needed to encourage her to rechannel some of the noises she could make when provoked into something mellifluous and becoming) frowned in her small way.
"You are completely ridiculous; this is utter nonsense. I think you have gotten us lost as well..." Alice was beginning to wonder if she shouldn't abandon him altogether.
"At the very least I am not the one going about making grandiloquently dramatic announcements and then growing hysterical when to everyone's complete surprise I apparently meant the opposite!" He turned, raised an eyebrow at her and adopted a high-pitched and very bad imitation of her voice, adding a whiny drawl to the words there. "I say, Mr. Hatter, you misinterpret my very meaning!" For some reason he bounced in place as only a schoolgirl on the eve before a County Fair can, and bent his elbows to dangle his limp wrists before him. "I only meant we should be on our way to the Duchess's house! What the Dickens do you mean by this impertinence, sir? I am most put out by such eccentricities as you display here!"
"Really, Mr. Hatter," she muttered quietly, hoping to leave the argument they had finally finished, pre-singing, at that. There had been a brief but heated discussion about the dangers of entering a country when for some unknown reason its residents were either being destroyed or were simply leaving; either way, she was eager to know when she could find some reliable information. The Hatter had stated quite adamantly that he knew nothing direct about the source of the problem, and repeated this claim until Alice gave up asking about it altogether.
He blessedly stopped bouncing and legged it a few steps forward to catch up with her. The path before them was not completely dark, as there were a few coach lanterns inexplicably growing out of every fifth tree just at the sides of the lane. The crickets had tuned themselves into a fully pitted orchestra, with the tymphonic accompaniment of what was likely a woodpecker, and were now well in on a mazurka. Distracted by her forthcoming interview, Alice pushed aside all that lay before her in these things, and considered the questions in her head a moment before speaking.
"Is the Duchess as I remember her?" It had seemed like a perfectly reasonable beginning, but the Hatter's reply broadsided her next question with a bang.
"You do not remember her. I mean to say, she is not the same Duchess as you remember. She is different one altogether," he said before Alice could ask the obvious; Alice, who mused on this and was conflicted. Who was the Duchess to summon her if she were not the same rag-faced woman who had stooped against her shoulder so annoyingly?
"'That epos on thy hundred plates of gold', I suppose one could say." Alice stopped again, and the Hatter paused a few feet ahead of her and turned mechanically.
"Is she the primary monarch?"
"Oh, rather, of course." He picked at his cuffs and looked at her with curiosity. Curiouser and curiouser, Alice began to think, before stoppering memories of a journey gone awry. The trick, she thought, was not to become too involved in the politics of the place, but to simply answer the call of an aristocrat and be back in time for her sister's nuptials. The scenario was turning more into a hedgemaze than remaining the strictest of paths Alice had (vainly, she thought) hoped it would. Turning a new corner closer to the middle of it all, she dove further into the sordid affair at hand, and away, away from the seven-eaved house in town.
"What happened to the Queen of Hearts?"
"She got Usurped." He pronounced the word with a heavy accent on the middle syllable. "Not long ago, but it's been some time..."
"Someone managed to overthrow her? But she seemed so..." Alice paused to think of a proper word for the woman.
"...raging with the white-hot intensity of a thousand flaming suns," the Hatter finished for her. It was an accurate turn of phrase, she had to admit. The woman had been a martinet, or a tyrant, or an absurdly egomaniacal and corrupt example of what the hierarchy could be... Alice realized the Hatter had raised his eyebrows at her in waiting.
"Yes, as you have put it."
"Well, one day the Queen awoke to find that her husband, the King, who was what you might describe as a..."
"Milquetoast," she offered.
"A milquetoast, yes, had hit the sky overnight, which left us all gasping fish. Especially since he was so awfully challenged in the vertical way to begin with. Something like six feet, I last heard count, enough to tower over the old girl, who was up there herself. Anyway, she busted her lip at him, and suddenly he had her over his knee laying into her with a slipper before she knew where she was, bellowing Roshambo."
"But then what happened?"
"Along came the Duchess, who claimed she'd been in court the entire time, and announced the Queen had declared her next in line to the throne, Order of the Empire and all that. Shocking, really." "Why is that?"
"The expectation was that her sisters would have a great row over the property."
"Her sisters."
"Yes, the other Queens."
"Oh, don't tell me: Spades, Clubs, and Diamonds?"
"Ah, you know them!"
"No, but it would seem like an obvious conclusion."
"They are all the ruling bodies of distant lands; Spades being the one convinced of the celestial bodies being in league against her, Clubs always the first at everything, and Diamonds--"
"Wealthy and prosperous?"
"On the contrary, she was purported to be manipulative and deceitful, and possibly ordered an assassination to gain more power." Alice backpedalled to avoid imbroiling herself in further intrigue. "So, in actuality, the Duchess is the Queen..."
"And the Queen has been demoted to Duchess, is how that follows logically here."
"But why do they still keep their old titles?" The Hatter made an impatient but very neat scoff.
"If they changed their names, it would be awfully perplexing, don't you think? We wouldn't know who was the Duchess or who was the Queen—you see, for we know them as only that." He was sipping on tea again, not that she could see him very clearly in this part of the path, but a click of china let Alice know he was truly nearby, an aural lighthouse as the path turned.
"What have you to do with all of this?"
"Me? You do ask terribly many questions, madam. Weaseling me for information will not get you far; I am only a messenger in all this tricky business. I could be a spy, or I may have been lied to to protect the interests of the Crown, or perhaps I was double-blinded and really told the facts, but then given suspicions as to their validity, or perhaps I am lying above everything else to you alone--"
"I'm sure the Duchess sent you as an escort for a reason."
"--thumping high number of spies and disembodied ears in this forest, could be flowing with creatures set on the latest demographic numbers from the population concensus--"
"Census, you mean,"
"No, consensus. We all agreed that there were a certain number of us, for we were quite sure we had all seen each other enough to simply know everyone, and that made things easier anyway." Alice did not reply, as she was turned halfway round to look at the path they had just traversed.
"Is it getting darker? The lanterns are gone."
"Oh, we must be there. The proverbial light at the end of the tunnel, replaced by an enfolding darkness... yes, we're nearly--" Alice had been expecting to see a large garden full of topiaries and playing cards marching about with axes and jousting poles, but stood blinking on the curb, looking out at the expansive street before her.
It would have been much like London, if London were of a quainter, more Continental nature, but the same feeling of greatness lent a brisk importance to the way people moved. The lanterns here were much larger and whiter, and so gave rise to the details—for there was much to see—and Alice stared. The line of stone-fronted shops across the thoroughfare had stacks of chimneys rising out of them, but were not pouring out the bubbling black coal of home: rather, a thin gray steam that dissipated into lighter and lighter fog. Even stranger were the shops, with a strong sense of parody about them, or at least smacking of plagiarism. "World-Famous Libertine Fabrics and Twist," read one sign oddly. "Faulkner's Letter Emporium—fresh shipment of Qs soon!" another promised.
The absurd normalcy of a real city contained within a childhood's confusion simply piled on a greater sense of profound depth to the place, Alice found. Round the gray fountain in the middle of the street came ringing a large coach box pulled by a hand in four of white-socked ponies, but with the addition of a set of pipes whistling in tune up near the driver's bench, shooting an energy she knew not but readily could see made up half the horsepower.
"External combustion engine!" cried the Hatter from behind her over the noise, pointing at it wildly. He seemed quite pleased as the thing chugged merrily past, bursting with people hanging out of the windows waving at others on the streets and singing bits of pomp and march. A couple sitting in a barouche slid past, and Alice could see a small wheel on the back pumping away for every step the horse took. As the raucous group drove on, followed by an identical public coach, he took her arm once more to cross. There was a gulping, plugging sound overhead, and the Hatter pointed to the shadowy bullet-shaped things floating effortlessly above.
"Manatees of the sky!—they're zeppelins, full of the Crown's guard. Not that much goes on here, but I imagine it gives the place a secure, official... impression. Decidedly eerie things, floating about watching us so discerningly," he said with a face. Alice found the zeppelins interesting as they swished and turned so readily, but did not object when they began walking in the opposite direction. "I had no idea there were cities here, I thought that everything was a garden maze or a little cottage," she said after the tin ring in her ears faded.
"Oh, surely you didn't think that was all there was, did you?"
"I must admit I did," said Alice, looking over her shoulder at an old crone zipping past on a bicycle, leaving a steaming trail in the street indicating her path. "Where did all these strange inventions come from?"
"The raging white-hot intensity of a thousand flaming suns," he said in perfect seriousness.
"You've already used that metaphor," she replied.
"It... applies well... to many things," said the Hatter in defense.
"I was just about to remark how nearly close to ordinary this place may have become, but I see you exceed expectations," she said, looking at him sidelong. They had passed three identical twins in stiff double-breasted coats and a young woman with a very tiny nose conveniently carrying an odiferous Moon Rat that was smacking at something pink in its tiny paws.
"I told you—you're what's changed. When you're very short, everything seems terribly large, correct?" She nodded. "But things do not grow down and down as you grow up and up. You never saw the capital because you weren't looking for it—you were looking for a way out."
"That is true," conceded Alice, "But it does not explain why the Queen's castle was where it was, or why the forest was how it was."
"You sought the Queen's palace as a girl searches for the shoes that will lead her down the right path home. It is all in how you look at things in this country that determines what you see. Your perspective changes as you grow older, and so does your idea of other things and people." This was more than true, thought Alice, remembering the tiny balding man underneath a ginormous hat, and the young man several inches taller than she, walking now abreast. Had he always been so tall, and she had simply never seen it? "That, and the royal house was backed by the mazes until the Duchess converted them into... whatever she did with them," and he gestured where they were standing at the large iron rods surrounding an estate several stone throws beyond.
The Hatter reached for a bronze hand sticking sideways out of the brick column nearby as if to shake it in greeting; he gave a hard pull back and released; there was a distant single line of chiming and the gates began a slow ease open, steam conspicuously rising near the treadlocks.
"After you," he said. Alice hesitated, her companion looking at her appraisingly with his hands in his pockets. He glanced at the great house beyond, then back at her, questioning.
"Surely you know the way better than I do."
"Ladies et cetera," he said, and motioned. Alice could do nothing but pinch back anxiety and listen to the gates whining shut after them.
The guards standing beside the outer doors did not blink or even look sidelong at the pair as they passed. The men's large Roman noses pointed outward and expressions of immense, though carefully constructed, patience, were plastered just beneath their thin eyebrows in the lamplight. Alice had perused them carefully out of interest while the Hatter exculpated their case to the doorman, and thought that there was something strange about them.
She could not put her finger on what precisely, however, and frowned through their escort inward, forgetting to wonder at the marvels of the entrance hall. It was not until they were standing in front of a tall slanted desk where another strange-nosed man was holding something out to her that she looked up. He cracked the open book in its place and slid it toward her expectantly. There were a few blurred signatures towards the top of the smooth, heavy page.
Taking the pen from an arching angle into the steady hold of her fingers, Alice signed her own name there, neat and smooth and straight from a primer. She wrote slowly and with the simple assurance that it was her identity upon the page and no one else's, and was satisfied when she stroked her last serif. The Hatter moved the pen in one hand from her and held that sleeve back with the other, looping his moniker in the India ink as well. As she watched him she realized his handwriting was far less sloppy than she could have predicted; there was a curious mixture of sharp lines and forgiving circles there within, a contrast that folded over on itself and became singular and personable for him and him alone. It served him, beyond everything else, and this small fact was surprising.
"You have a unique signature," she remarked quietly as he gave the handled nib back to the page, who doused the vellum sheets with inking sand and blew gently to dry their now smudged names, still shining a spry black. Soon they paced down a long hallway papered in thick white stripes along a red carpet with long golden spirals, past busts of pigs and tapestries of medieval pie fights that stretched far down the hall to a pair of slim high doors.
"Comes from writing specifications, which are lengthy and tedious and actually require me to pay attention," he spoke contempt at the last two words, inspecting his snow-white gloves and squinting. "Far too much work for what they yield, honestly I don't think they're designed for much of anything besides wasting my time, limitless though it often seems."
"I wouldn't have thought Hatters wrote much of anything past the prices or the books," said Alice gesturing at the obvious tucked into his prominent headgear. His detailed analysis moved upward to the bright orange coat cuff buttons, and the Hatter smiled briefly at his wrists.
"What, you think hat-sharpening is the only thing I've ever done? I should just as soon ask if you have always been a lady and expect a logical answer," and they moved inward to the wide square room beyond the cornflower doors.
"Ah, but you see that I would be able to exceed your expectations, for I have been a lady as long as I have been a member of the female sex. Surely you find that logical in your own way?" said Alice with a clever voice and smug smile. She was most assuredly going to mark one up for herself in the continuing battle against his swinging quips and illogical roundabouts. The Hatter nodded forward, and Alice turned before the whole effect dropped onto the floor.
They were in a black and white checkered room, where beneath a ring of official people painted on the ceiling watched them cross the room, Alice and the Hatter crossed a four-poster pedastalled on veiny marble to the gold vanity as large as three buffets and as tall as an armoire. Six mirrors threw back the entirety of the room, and Alice saw all of herselves stop a few feet hence. It was a very nice room, finely spun together in statured managability and pleasing airs—a proper chamber for a proper monarch.
But past all of this, past the sea of color and the feeling of the Hatter standing just beyond her shoulder (in a comforting way that people who are newcomers together share in the face of social adversity), there was the soft voice at the end of the hall, and when it spun delicately across the checkered tile, Alice's expression became that of her younger self, wide-eyed and cautious.
The woman was striding toward Alice with a placidity suggesting deeper knowledge of events unfolding. The Duchess was lovely, with beautifully curving eyebrows. Her watered silk gray gown was not sad or practical, but set off a whiteness in her blonde updo so that she was a statue of a goddess with an ivory ruling hand, all capability sailing on an even keel.
"We have been waiting so patiently," she was murmuring, "and at last we are here, at last." There was such an expression of serenity from beginning to end in her; the woman's pale features were round and smooth and reassuring—not at all what one would expect of a monarch among mad people. The Duchess tilted her chin to look at Alice almost wistfully, ten miles away through the mere steps separating them both. "You are as pretty as I would have thought, my dear," she said at length.
"Thank you, Your Grace," said Alice, who could not think of a better reply, and very nearly shrunk under the monarch's amusement at this, but instead curtseyed politely.
"I trust you keep a copy of Burke's at home?"
"Yes, Your Grace," said Alice, who did not see the significance of this.
"In your father's study," said the Duchess. "I should imagine."
"Yes, Your Grace."
"It is proper for a young lady to know the peerage well, even if she is not a part of it herself." Her voice was low and dusky, smooth and diplomatic. "You shall do very well as a Lady here, we think."
"If I may ask," said Alice quietly as the woman moved before the mirrors to look within and back out at her, for she had apparently deemed the matter settled, "Why is it so essential that I be titled?"
"You have learned nothing? That is fitting somehow," she said, but she was looking at the Hatter. "We suppose we might grace you with an explanation," said the Duchess, and turned so that the perfect swirl of her hair repeated itself sixfold. "Names are... so personal. It is much easier to remember one's qualities than some name one has been bestowed, and there are so many characters of a... natural bent that one simply cannot call the cat George or Richard. It is hardly fitting, as the Cheshire Cat is just that, and the March Hare is that as well."
"And the people--"
"People!" said the Duchess, and turned again to look into the mirror at Alice. "The people are more than willing to be titled, as it does make them gentrified and far more interesting in their way. You shall be called Lady, for we do not know you well enough, and that is as fine a term for someone who has been here thrice yet." Alice let the ensuing silence creep out of the corners behind the large bed on the dais and folded her hands together.
"We have asked you here because you are a clever girl, one whose curiosity suits her, and because surfaced rumors grow concerning. Residents have begun disappearing—we would trust you to discover them and their reason for leaving. It is not proper for denizens of such a close place to simply leave. You will stay, then; we shall afford you an abode and you shall be quite comfortable."
"Thank you, Your Grace," said Alice, feeling a dark presence in her middle where she remembered the pale Lilies of the Valley her sister had begun to place in the hall before the sitting room.
The gray monarch gestured to the man in the orange coat who clashed so horribly with the blue bedcurtains far beyond. "Mr. Hatter, you return. We recall you once, painting testimonial pictures in our court." He did not reply, to which she smiled in what she seemed to think was a knowing smile between compatriots. "Lead her carefully into no traps but only the brightest of certainties. Do not fail us," and Alice saw in the mirror without turning her head at all that the Hatter was standing stock still, giving the Duchess the same intense stare she commanded now.
"Of course," was his muted response.
The Duchess pushed herself off the vanity surface with her palms and crossed the room to a large red door with gold handles. "Come," she said, "We will dine in court and set you in oficias." The doors opened into the hall beyond, and following the monarch Alice released the breath she had kept tightly.
Before them stood a cavalcade of people staring at them with the same self-important expressions and high, lined eyebrows the aristocracy apparently deemed so essential a feature. They were grouped together by color, she could plainly see, though no real system of coding seemed to encompass the entire room, and so reds struck out against green and violet was striped at crossings with yellow.
The ladies had piling confections of hair topped off with various thematic decorations as Alice had heard of the court rooms of old Versailles, but not to such an elaborate degree. Here were ladies with tiered cakes baked into their hair, ladies with cages swinging inside perfect loops of hair housing choruses of tropical birds who talked and sang and told jokes in foreign accents, and even a woman whose hair was so heavy it had developed its own gravity: tiny moons ellipsoided her as she swatted a rogue candle caught up in her orbit. Men with very straight noses, nearly parallel lines to their face, stood posed about the place with their fingers inside their bright waistcoats, looking immensely bored with the whole thing and trying desperately to ignore Alice and the Hatter as their footsteps dropped into the intolerable silence of such a huge space.
There is no feeling that compares with the tingling uncertainty of having a roomful of important and well-dressed people stare at you with blank expressions. They are unsure of who you are, or why you are there, or whether you will amuse them, and so they do not greet you with smiles and bows and pretty words. This applies to people at all levels of extroversion, but the difference between the shrinking violet and the brassy clown is their reaction to being made of a spectacle.
Fortunately for Alice, she was so curious and interested in the general assembly's appearance that she remained calm and collected—a lesser woman would have hunched her shoulders and meekly approached the gap where the crowd had divided itself remarkably well without Moses, but Alice looked back at everyone and forgot the silent promise she had made to behave as one would at St. James's. She was lucky, for while the British courts required a feeling of utmost decorum and dignity, here the rule of thumb was to make as grand an entrance as possible—very strict punishment was in order for those who did not goggle at the crowd as the crowd did goggle.
"Lady," said the Duchess, gesturing to Alice as a means of introductory remarks, "Serve her the greatest hospitality, and so let us begin." The court moved in flashing schools to sit at the piles of flowers and bowls seeming to float in midair, they did cover the tables so holistically. The Duchess sat alone on a parapet in equal splendor, watching over her beautiful courtiers as they basked in general opulence.
The platter before her held something round and covered in a shell. Looking about, Alice saw that the other diners nearby had reached the table long before she had and were already sliced into... whatever this was. She turned to see the Hatter smacking concentratedly away at it with a meat hammer; he let the thing open and steam out before applying himself with efficiency to her main course. He did not speak as the hammer hit, and hit, and hit.
"What is it?" said Alice, fanning at the steam and peering within.
"Hedgehog," he said shortly, and the young woman made a face, at least in part at his abrupt manner. "Oh, don't be silly," said the Hatter gently now, and offered her a stab of it on the fork. Alice took tiny bites before deciding it held a texture suggesting a much larger source than such a tiny—she hit the fork and pulled it away from her face only to realize she had nearly bitten into a circlet larger than a ring but smaller than a bracelet.
"What does a hedgehog want with a gold ring?" she asked, and set it on the table. The Hatter shrugged and separated the meat from the chaff on her plate, as it were. Twenty minutes later, however, she was wishing for a seat near the Duchess, as icy as the woman was. The Hatter had returned from his brusque run-in with the tiny creatures and was in full force.
Apparently thinking that colorful French phrases would delight and charm all around him, he had already used one particularly insulting combination and was grinning delightedly at the old man across the table, who seemed quite perplexed at this. She immediately turned to the thin and stringy woman sitting next to her.
"How are you finding the vichyssoise?" she began, before she realized the chair was actually being occupied by a flamingo hanging off someone else's hat. The large bird glared at her silently, extending its neck to achieve the full vultureous effect, and she wondered perhaps if it was a cousin of her old croquet mallet. She never did seem to get along with the poor creatures, and this one was no exception until its owner produced a yo-yo as a means of well-received distraction.
The Hatter was toasting someone far down the other end of the table in lurid detail of how large and hairy their—well. Alice sighed in disgust, but not before he swung a dish covered in pink frothy bubbles under her nose and leaned in closely as if to tell her a secret low in her ears. "Quel cul tu as," was all he managed to get out before she nearly inhaled her entire glass of wine and spent the next minute and a half coughing.
"Veux-tu m'épouser?" he said, with no apparent idea as to its meaning, for he said it in a chiding tone of voice, for she had turned the tablecloth quite pink. Alice set down her fork too loudly and stared at him witheringly for a full ten seconds.
"You do realize that I can understand everything coming out of your mouth, don't you?" she finally replied archingly. "I should not consider myself a properly educated young lady if I did not know at least some French," this in reply to the fact that he was chuckling into a large trifle.
"Then you should continue the speech," he said, and waved a spoon at her.
"I wouldn't dream of being so unmannered as to carry on conversation in a different language than what is common at the table."
"That is your curse, then. You know French for the sake of being educated and not for the sake of simply knowing—you should know something just to know, yes?" The elderly pair on his right side nodded emphatically and promptly returned to their snoozing. The Hatter stuck out his lower lip at the notably speechless Alice. "Come, let us be friends: I need a shoulder to cry on after being rejected so soundly, and I am your faithful guide by order of the Crown."
This was how Alice found herself befuddled at a palace banquet, surrounded by the landed gentry of Wonderland, with the Hatter's chin on her shoulder, his hat nearly covering the both of them like an umbrella, while he tried to convince her to stick his fork into the trifle, the emphasis being on the part where she would transfer it to his mouth.