But when a young lady is to be a heroine ... [s]omething must and will happen to throw a hero in her way.
Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey
Après moi, le déluge.
Louis XV
Not every ball takes place moments after the invitation is slipped into our home post. There is a seemingly endless wait which involves a lot of sitting around doing nothing, with no particular exciting episode to punctuate any of it—which is why balls and grand parties are so tremendous to begin with. They are the goal toward which we suffer in the meantime when we are not going to balls and grand parties. In this interim, week-old newspapers litter the floor, the tea service shan't be scoured until someone gets up the verve to do something about it, and there is a general kind of malaise that begins to smother the finer senses. The worst part is that the ball created the waiting, but without the wait, there would be no ball. However, let us not say that waiting periods are all monotony: the excitement for you and me might be found hidden in the details when people are pent up inside a place with no one to talk to but themselves and each other. Thus we find our heroine, and dare I speculate, dear reader, our emerging hero as well.
Alice pressed her fingernails into the heel of her palm one by one in a rhythm, remembering piano lessons from younger days and listening to the tapping that made the leaves bounce on the vine next to the window which she had opened in an outward swinging motion. She squeezed her fists like that in time before reaching out to pull close the diamond pane. On the last sunny day before Alice began to begin each morning with a sigh upon seeing the impenetrable clouds above, they had gone to the tracks for the final race of the season. The animals at the gate were large pig-like things with skin the color of pistachio pudding, and Alice was more surprised at her own lack of surprise regarding the contestants than she was at their actual appearance. The Hatter had proved himself to be quite an efficient handicapper of... whatever these things were, and Alice wondered if perhaps this was how he was moneyed, but she did not ask and he did not comment upon it. He had explained nothing but spent the time between gates regaling her with an odd, piecemeal story involving a false mustache and a policeman who apparently wanted a word with him about a stolen parrot.
Once the rainy season started, hidden strata of dirt and soft spots in the leaf-strewn grass cooperatively began to form mini-lakes all across the lawn so that Alice felt in turns both the keen desire to jump in each pool to see if it perhaps went somewhere and a disgusted shudder at the hideous way the water created a honeycomb effect which seemed to grow finer and more complex every time she looked outside. More often than not, the rain came down not in gusting torrents or hard thick pelts that gave way to soft shimmering sunsets, but a constant flow in trackmarks down the sides of the house, as if it were crying for something lost. Even the wardrobes felt the effects, for Alice could now only find high gowns in deeply blushing shades of burgundy or violet with startlingly large bows at the collar when she went to dress. Each morning she inspected carefully for anything larger or ballgowny, but as of yet the magic was lacking.
They had begun autumning, if that were possible, at the Hatter's. The Hare was not gone off quite yet, but he had begun slinging things into cupboards and drawers with a purposeful, striding energy, and the Hatter had assumed a placid and blithe air, opened an umbrella, taken Alice's arm and ambled toward the swinging gate before she found herself at the raspberry colored place with the apparent unspoken understanding between them that this would be well and fine. But Alice was not keen to shrug and passively occupy without inspection such a place as where the Hatter carried on the business of living. She could not really find the wherewithall to call it a home, for its dark trappings and deep marbled woods gave it an air of belonging to some great and ancient wealth that could not possibly consider a place of mere living capacity sufficient for its majesty; it was not a mansion or an estate, either, for it was far too eccentric to be turned respectable by a portrait gallery, statuary, or series of trophy-like topiaries leading up a long gravel drive to the front portico. No, this place was something new altogether, she felt. She rose from the quasi-secluded window-box to look into a cabinet nearby, and this time she opened the delicate latch to get a better look at the curiosities inside.
The Hatter had scores of them inside these hexagonal glass-paneled display cases taller than she was that were placed strategically like side-tables around the dark sitting room where he had placed her on that singular night. But in them were not tiny crystal animals or arrangements of dried flowers as in any other house of the day, but instead an almost ironical display of what he in his turn perhaps considered useless objects: logical artwork or cogent curio pieces. Here was an assortment of what she could only identify as a collection of tools—scientific or nautical instruments, brass contraptions meant to instruct, to clear the path, to guide the way. There were astrolabes with tiny engraved signs of the heavens, hemispherical cup anemometers with beautifully lathed bases—everything was bright and shining, and strangely protected behind the odd barrier. Alice didn't touch them; they were far too smooth for her fingerprints to smudge. She shut the glass with a snap and looked over her shoulder at where her host was sprawled out over a dark red fainting couch, one leg hooked up around the curliquing wood back, with crossword puzzle before him but his attention off somewhere through the window and between the trees past the lawn. He looked very relaxed but for the distance in his gaze.
She crossed the room to sit on an ottoman next to an overgrown palmetto within his view. The room was large and handsome, and certainly interesting with its general sense of being something a world-jetting game hunter or exotic jungle botanist would be proud of, but Alice had been inspecting the details with a put-on casual air for a while now, and so curiosity had begun to draw its velvety question-mark-shaped tail between her ankles with an incessant purring. How she longed to open each door here, to slowly take the grand staircase up to the landing and let the corridors above make themselves be known to her in dramatic reveal. She wanted to know, she had to know what sort of a place the Hatter lived in—this interest had superseded the vagaries of the Duchess's instructions and plans in investigation and was so exhaustingly prevalent a question for her that she was growing rather hungry.
"Bored?" he said at last, looking amused at her cerebral countenance.
Alice was terribly bored. The Hatter did not seem to be offended by his own suggestion that he was neglecting his rightful duties as host; she was not surprised, as he seemed to think the sitting room had presented itself far better than he ever could have introduced it. Alice had glanced over the cobbled-together list of residents whose names she actually recognized five times in the last hour and was, at this point, more interested in the way she had looped her gs than she was in who was missing or who had been seen last.
"Does it rain like this for a long time?" she said finally.
"Forever and ever, at least until winter," he said. They lapsed back into silence until a longcase clock near the shadows on the wall began to chime; Alice counted the bell on one over and over to avoid the passage of time, not feeling any desire to know how long they had been sitting there. She was trying not to wonder what sort of a partner he would be at this ball—what more oddities and shenanigans she would have to sigh over—until she realized that she really didn't mind. It wasn't exactly her problem to clothesline any untoward behavior, and he had been receiving return invitations—perhaps there would be something to it all. He was sitting on the sofa only now, looking for all the world as if he were ever her rainy day companion who... just happened to have very odd white hair. She twisted her fingers into the church and steeple and considered this.
"Do you play cards?" Alice found herself momentarily perplexed by the question, having never seen the Hatter with a deck of cards or ever in the midst of a game.
"Well, I suppose it depends on the game," she replied. He began to extricate his leg from around the couch's imperial back and began rummaging through a drawer in a table with legs textured like tree trunks, and she felt the feathery wisp of doubt about playing cards with this man.
Alice had to admit, however, that it was a rather clever bit of divertissement once she began to understand the rules, which he was loathe to clarify and explain and made her think perhaps he played unwillingly. At first it had seemed that there were no rules and he was just having fun with leading her around in circles over nothing, but the game turned out to be a variation on Fish, and she saw his assumption that she already understood the sport's mechanics. So though they were playing with a deck that Alice, frankly, found rather disconcerting, she gamely and successfully kept up to him, occult or no. She had, on more than beginner's luck, won the first round ("Well played," he had said with keen sidelong look suggesting that perhaps he found her indeed to be a worthy opponent, to which she had dramatically lifted one brow and replied in an archly cunning voice, "Again, sir?"--it was all rather comically serious).
"Do you have any Aces?" she asked, and showed him the card in her hand as proof that she could ask for them. He put the Ace of Cups on the table and worried his pipe back and forth over his teeth, concentrating on the hand. Alice eased her new acquisition smoothly against its mate and looked at her own cards, which were separated by arcanum. The suits were easy enough to understand, but the set of extra cards beyond those, with their variable actions, required some interpretation—each had a prize move associated with it, good or bad, and one could snatch full books of cards from one's opponent with the right one. She currently had XVIII, bearing the image of the moon shining over pairs of stone columns and howling dogs. She didn't like it; it was a strange and forceful picture, not at all the romantical bath of white light she liked to think of coming from the dreamy satellite far above.
"Brilliant!" he said, as if he were about to announce checkmate, "This will be a lateral move." He snapped a card onto the table between them, and upon its face Alice could see a picture of a young man with yellowish-white curls and a lemniscate painted on the brim of his smart hat, gesturing with a long silver baton in hand.
"What does that one mean?"
"Er, wisdom and the power to know the unknowable," he replied offhandedly. "Lets me ask for a card I don't have. Yes, that's very like cheating, isn't it?" he said at her look, "Good thing there's only one. Shall I try sevens? I like sevens and shall take the chance that you are flush with them." She was, and she fanned the three she had onto the table, and he took them without braggadocio or comment.
"What does this one mean?" said Alice, and held up the card marked with XVI. The Hatter's expression changed from one of concentration to gracious defeat and amusement.
"You clever girl!" he cried, and Alice turned it over to look at it more carefully. "How very like you to pull off such a fantastic trick. That's the proverbial Old Maid," he said. "It ends the game automatically—I was rather hoping it would be at the bottom of the pile where I wouldn't have to worry about it, but you have won again, and perhaps that's all that matters in the end."
"Oh," said Alice, and she felt much better about not understanding anything after that.
They played two more hands, both of which the Hatter won, and then he slid back a wooden panel in the gaming table and pressed a golden switch on a panel of many before he seemed to remember something, as he winced and froze with his hand above the switchboard. This was the most mysterious and attention-arresting thing he had done all day, and Alice watched as an inner circle section of the table sunk low into the floor, and there was a tremendous rattling sound followed by a bursting whistle of steam which sprang up from the table before it cleared away and there was revealed a full tea service right there.
She stared at him, and the Hatter had the good nonsense to look a bit sheepish.
"Er," he began delicately, pouring her tea first by way of placation. "I don't keep help. They're absolutely useless, always trying to organize and standardize things. But it is a large house, you know, and it is rather annoying having to slide up and down the bannister all day just to fetch tea when one has a tendency to crave it every five minutes—going up is the hard part. Do you take sugar? Oh, no, of course not. There's a steamvalve pipe system in the whole house, they look like brass decorations on the walls; one table in every room is connected to that and the horizontal dumbwaiters."
"Is this all your doing?"
He hesitated, let the moment slide past, and then--"Yes."
"You astonish me." It was really getting to be a repetitive sentiment.
"Oh, rather," he said by way of being a bit pleased. They split the entire meringue and she really had to admit that the house could make a fine cup of tea—not so strong as to cause the bitter shakes, but dark and lovely like the grain in lacquer rosewood.
"Why do you have a kitchen, then?" said Alice, who was not willing to let this rather juicy piece of information get away from her too soon.
"Well, it's got to have a place to make things, doesn't it? It's not magic." She tried to connect how automaton steam boiler plus furnished kitchen equalled the cup of tea in her fingertips, and decided that as she hadn't directly seen the kitchen itself yet, she couldn't quite pass judgment. But lo, it was an odd realization which came to her: the Hatter's house was really kind of—of interdependent upon itself, a place with internal workings and systems, not simply rooms or display galleries. And then Alice could tell that any tour of the place would play out in roles of mutual exchange—a game for a room.
"We could luge the stairs," he said when they reached the bottom of the staircase.
"Hmm?" said Alice, who was already distracted by the ripeness of exploration, for the upstairs landing ran somewhat discreetly around the outer edges of the rotunda, and no matter which direction she craned her neck, the vantage seemed the same.
"Don't tell me you've never tried it," he said, and suddenly leaned in angles and moved in such a way that she could not avoid seeing him, and they crossbattled like that for a moment. Alice stood on toe to peer over his shoulder, and only when he mimicked her stance, straightfaced, did she return to the conversation, at least partially.
"What?"
"It's like sliding down the bannister."
"That's terribly unladylike," she said automatically, and turned around to look over her other shoulder at the short hall that went that way. The runners that started were expressed of an odd abstract swirling pattern, and seemed of another place or time. Everything in the house was just on the verge of being normal and looking as it did in her natural home or any other English house, but with the strangest sense of being just a smidge off, just by one or two degrees in physicality or seconds in time, and Alice rather wished he would stop carrying on so.
"You've never tried that either, have you?"
"Of course not," she said dismissively.
"Well, you do want to see the rest of the house, don't you?" Alice was given pause by this rather intriguing and potentious statement. "Ah, I'm right, aren't I? The aired out sitting room is never enough; it's the gate to the darkened and mysterious garden path leading to parts unknown. You should see the look on your face," he said, and smiled strangely, halfway between smug and magnanimous. She crossed her arms over her chest and gazed pointedly at the window in the far corner, not sulking, but feeling a twinge at where he had pinpointed her.
And now she was sitting sidesaddle where he had placed her at the top of the stairs on the landing looking down into the large tiled checkerboard atrium, but Alice was more interested in the oddly-patterned vase she could see just around the corner up here in the private quarters of his house. Where he lived. She could just see door handles poking out from beyond mahogany jambs, more clean and bright brass. He was giving her instructions on how to balance herself as she slid down, or something about how to fall. Alice wondered what he kept in all those rooms if he lived here alone.
"Are you listening to me?"
"No," she said vaguely, and stretched her neck so far that she had to hook her boot between the railings to lean far enough back to see down the hall. She sat up again to find him looking just the slightest bit annoyed.
"A governess doesn't teach you these sorts of real-world skills, you know. This has actual application," and he stabbed his finger into the bannister swirl to drive home the point.
"Really," said Alice, trying to remember how many floors there were and coming up uncertain—didn't the place have a mansard roof?
"I shall prove it to you one day," he was saying, and then he had his hand in the small of her back, and Alice started to feel her center of gravity being dislodged in a fluid motion before she opened her mouth and began to squawk and flail like some sort of beribboned exotic bird being matter-of-factly ejected from the nest for the first time. The bannister, unfortunately, was lacquered and her feet did not reach the runner-covered stairs; as she approached the curled-off baluster at the bottom, Alice could vaguely see blurred portraits hanging in the stairwell and rushed past a momentary thought regarding what a broken arm might feel like. But perhaps out of a continuing streak of beginner's luck or maybe even some innate sense of coordinate physics, Alice twisted herself sideways and landed with a bit of a bounce to her toe on the dark Oriental rug before the front door, bones whole. She looked up and up and saw him standing arms akimbo at the very top of the stairs, leaning forward, hands on knees, to look back down at her with an I told you so, didn't I expression about him, which was oddly becoming, but she did not welcome the sentiment warmly given his treachery.
"That was low!" she trumpeted, for there was some distance between them and their conversation came out sounding like spelunkers arguing over which echoing tunnel they should have turned at.
"You should thank me," she heard him say, "I'm sure you wouldn't have done it without my expert persuasion. In fact, I daresay you are more well-rounded for the experience and will write to your mother or somesuch thing as ladies do when there's lifechanging odds about."
"I ought to go home if you're going to spend the afternoon putting me in danger like that," she replied a bit haughtily, but without much heat, for she had suddenly remembered home did not mean home. He leaned with his elbow against the other baluster all the way at the top and assumed a cheerful and grinning casual air.
"Did I tell you there's a ballroom on the fourth floor?" Alice stopped from where she was considering whether to reach for the handle and narrowed her eyes several feet from the front door, another one undeserving of her censure and prejudice. The man at the top of the stairs really did hold all the juicy trump cards these days, she felt. He could just as well hold a ball in the front atrium as on an entirely other floor. But then she turned and saw a lovely looking closed set of white double doors with gold leaf banding pressed gently into the moulding. Alice looked up at the Hatter all the far way up the stairs, and then at the handles. She loosely calculated how long it would take him to reach her, taking into account the slick rails on the stairs and confidently decided this was well worth the effort. She gave a small wave (to which he waved back with a bit of an equally amiable but confused air, which she felt was very promising), a girlish flounce for good measure, and pushed open the dining room doors with all flourish.
The one thing she could say was that it was easily the longest table she had ever seen. It was a very tall, and oval, and dark emerald room, with white crown moulding so bright it was nearly blue, a set of very high-backed straight-looking chairs and a runnerboard service roughly about the size of a small stable off to one side which had large brass pipes sleekly coming off its edges, shaped impressively like an organ. But there was no centerpiece or display settings, for everything was covered in dustcloths in a strange sad sort of way, and then the Hatter appeared and was flapping his hands at her to shuttle her out, pulling the doors close at his back.
"What do you want to go in there for!" he cried, but he was not angry, merely put out at having had to steer her back from her diversion.
"Well, alright," said Alice congenially, "Now what shall we do? Are you going to slap me on the wrist for trespassing where I shouldn't?"
And then Alice found herself looking at the back of his head with some traditional Alician concern, her boot toes hooked awkwardly and rather unwillingly under his ankles. She reached for her skirts for the fifth time and again he swatted her hand away, being very particular that she not try to make a break for it again. They were sitting on the landing at the top of the stairs looking back down into the main entry, and Alice could just see the start of the browning grass outside through the open half of the front door, which was being propped with one of his shoes wedged haphazardly in a squishy way underneath. He had grabbed the Japanese folding panels from a corner by the fireplace in the great sitting room, marched up the stairs to drop it onto the landing with a bang, pulled her down (despite protestations and Alice making it a third of the way back down the stairs before he could catch her) behind him into pillion and was now arranging his shockwig hair to adjust for the strap on the pair of welding goggles he had brandished from somewhere.
"Should I have a pair of those?" said Alice skeptically, and eyed the current status of her hem again. She had begun to accept that this was about to happen and was trying to at least mitigate the damages. He turned to look at her, but she could not read his eyes through the dark lens.
"You really have never done this before, have you? What on earth did you do all day as a child? Besides darken our tea table with your tiny shadow and nearly lose your head?"
"Behaved myself and completed my lessons," said Alice. It was a mostly true statement--she had never tobogganed down the staircase at home, but for present purposes it was accurate. "Why, what did you do—set fire to your tutor's hair and let all the pigs into the garden? Did your father cane you or switch you?" she asked, teasing. He straightened imperially, put his considerable nose in the air and spoke so loftily she couldn't tell if he were joking or not.
"I supped on milk and honey and wore a lambskin cap over my perfect curls." He began to lean forward, but then thought a moment and turned back to her again. "You're going to want to hold onto something, you know. Not unless you want mangled and twisted up knuckles," he said as her hands reached for the sides of the panel. She clenched them into light fists again and looked at him, a bit of insolence creeping around the edge of her jawline. He grabbed her hands and in one singular jerking motion Alice's insolent chin became familiarly acquainted with his shoulderblades—she preferred not to dwell on the way her fingers were forcibly clapsed somewhere near the top button on his (silk, she realized with a cringe) waistcoat. She felt him ready, then begin to lean forward, and then just as the ceiling and walls began to tilt, out of her uncovered ear she heard him say, "Wait, I don't have anything to hang onto..."
Then he started yelling, and through the thrust tension of every muscle in her arms fighting him off while he simultaneously pinned her back against him to keep her from tumbling down the stairs, she started yelling, and the whole thing was about as panicky and cacophonous and comedically clumsy as one might imagine, what with the slam-puck clattering and the banging and the rushing sound that was growing louder and the yelling. The most marvelous thing, Alice realized with clarity as she reached a new note, was the way they simply glided across the tile in the rotunda, almost as if it had been laid with that very purpose in mind. It was, all things considering, a rather beautiful and graceful motion.
And then they came to a rather sudden sticky squelching stop in the front lawn, which, if you remember correctly, dear reader, was, shall we say, rather damp. Alice extricated herself at last from her host's clutches and feeling a bit dazed, sat back and remembered to breathe again. The Japanese folding panel, of course, was a total loss, the could see, the wood having failed to stand up to experimental abuse. At least it was that and not her fingers after all. The Hatter slowly turned and faced her, and Alice thought was a curious thing it was how dull he looked out in the open cloudlight until she realized that his hair had turned a dingy greyish brown. He lifted the goggles and there were two large bright white rings around his eyes, negative space that the mud had missed when they had hit the puddle.
She felt sympathy for him having bravely sacrificed to be in front and take the full throttle of the day's events, but she felt the laughter even more. And Alice wondered what the staircases would be like and whether the tiles were as smooth in the grand pavilion style rooms in the villa, or the castle, or whatever glamorous place this ball was to be held. It would be alright, she thought in conjunction with the euphoria and relief, no matter what happened, because at least it would be a laugh.
"Well," he said in a most serious tone, and she started busting up giggling again as a large hunk of dirt slid off his front with a fshthplunth, "I hope you found that very educational, because I think my right sock is in a state of hashed up horror, and I would hate to lose a favored pair if we gained nothing from this." She snorted, hid her face in his shoulders again, and then he was laughing as well.