Unbirthday

by Liz Braswell

  (Although, unlike Wonderland folk, Katz was fully human and had lips the same color as his cheeks, only several shades darker.)

  “What the—what in blazes is going on here?”

  Alice looked around the park, expecting some sort of crime or other shenanigan being perpetrated. But there was nothing. Before them on the path was a governess and her two young charges who ran back and forth happily. Beyond them a hunched-over and ancient couple wandered up a hill hand in hand. The scene was as serene as it could be.

  Behind them, however, was Mr. Coney—really, of all the bad luck!—striding quickly to catch up. Now he wore a moderately trendy milk chocolate suit with wide trousers, long jacket, and a crisp straw hat. This sat almost perfectly down on his voluminous, macassar-oiled hair; Alice wondered if he had to put it on while still styling his locks. If she didn’t imagine how it smelled or felt, it came across as very stylish.

  She heard the wisp of a sigh from Katz, but that was all: his smiling brown eyes crystallized into stoic blandness.

  “Who are you? Is this man bothering you? Stop harassing this lady at once!” Coney ordered. “Leave her in peace.”

  The children playing up ahead giggled at his behavior. It was more than obvious that Katz and Alice were friendly and no one was bothering anyone.

  Alice felt bad for everyone involved in or watching the situation, even Coney—but mostly she wished he would disappear. Down into a rabbit hole, perhaps.

  “In peace?” she asked dryly. “From what?”

  “I hadn’t realized my appearance was so frightening. Unless you already knew I was a barrister,” Katz said easily with a mocking little bow.

  “Now that I see you up close, I realize I do know you. You’re the one who is always engaging with all the street rats and rabble from Wellington Square,” Coney said accusingly. “You visit with pretentions and airs of doing good—but really with schemes and questionable motives.”

  A shade of rose deeper than normal came and went over Katz’s face like a single ripple across an otherwise still pond. It left nothing in its wake, disappearing entirely.

  “No pretentions, good sir; I leave that to those who have time for leisure and stylish hats. The children of the Square and their families are often at the mercy of a system weighted against their favor—I should know. I just help even the odds a bit.”

  “Mr. Coney,” Alice said as politely as she could. “How pleasant to see you again. Where are you off to?”

  She hoped he understood the not so subtle hint. Off to. As in, away.

  “I am in fact hurrying to a meeting specifically about saving our country from these—those—pestilential parasites,” he replied with an impressive amount of hauteur. “Before they wind up staying here permanently, agitating to destroy England as they are trying in Russia. They have no patriotism, you know, even the so-called citizens who were born here. They have no loyalty to anything save each other and their—their—golden coins.”

  “Shekels, I think you mean to say,” Katz offered politely.

  “They are trying to unseat the tsar!”

  “Are you kidding me?” the other man said, finally losing his composure. His face showed a mix of genuine disbelief and a terrible tiredness; for a moment the edges of his eyes made him look far older than his years. Somehow this distinct lack of rage and the intelligence behind it, sparkled in his eyes like a treasure, ancient and precious.

  Alice felt her chest tighten. It hurt and felt wonderful at the same time.

  “That story is just that—a story. It’s anti-Semitic filth. My people have been suffering at the hands of the tsar and our fellow countrymen—not the other way around.”

  “Of course you would say that,” Coney said, moving forward into Katz’s space, glaring down at the slightly shorter man.

  Katz gazed back at him impassively.

  Alice wondered, perhaps for the first time—although certainly not the last—if all human conflicts were started by men who thought they were doing it for a woman.

  “I’m not entirely certain why you’re concerned with the fate of Russia’s tsar,” she said, interrupting what appeared to be a heavy-breathing match, “but I do think you’re being rather unforgivably rude. Mr. Katz and I are friends, and we just happened to bump into each other in the park. Rather like you’re just bumping into us, now. He was offering to walk me home.”

  Katz blinked at this unexpected statement and smiled stupidly before recovering himself.

  “Indeed?” Coney said on a long inhale. “Well, I shall relieve him of that duty. I was heading that way myself to meet with Corwin and then pick up your sister. We are all attending an organizational meeting for the Ramsbottom fundraiser tomorrow night. I am in charge of the souvenir pins.”

  “Oh, of course you’re supporting Gilbert Ramsbottom. That xenophobic troglodyte,” Katz said, rolling his eyes. “I wonder whom you will get to scrub your floors and fetch your coal and wet-nurse your babies once he has kicked out everyone not named Harold or Arthur or William. I shall bid you good afternoon, then; have fun shaking your fasces at the rabble. Alice.”

  He gave her a quick bow and sauntered off into the late afternoon, whistling. She watched him go with wonder: somehow he had exited the scene without appearing to have lost the conversation.

  “Alice?” Coney demanded. “He has the gall to call you by your Christian name?”

  “Oh, do shut up,” Alice said, at the last minute trying to put a droll spin on her words. If she had been a true Wonderlandian, of course, she wouldn’t have bothered. “If you’re going to walk me home, let us hurry, at least.”

  And she set off grimly to the park’s exit.

  She had hoped to shake the terrible young man loose before actually approaching the door of her house; if he was seen by one of her parents, or God forbid, her sister, he would no doubt be invited in, and then she would have to bear even more of his now-loathsome presence. She put what appeared to be a delicate hand on the brass doorknob and gripped it with a strength that rivaled a carnival strongman’s.

  “Thank you, Mr. Coney, good evening,” she said, opening the door as narrowly as possible.

  “Alice? Are you home? Who is that?” her mother called from the foyer.

  “Is that your mother?” Coney asked.

  “Not at all,” Alice promptly lied. “Good evening, Mr. Coney.”

  She sidled her way around the edge of the door to the inside in the most unladylike, serpentine manner and slammed it behind her, leaning against it as if to keep all the Visigoths out.

  “Unwanted suitor?” her mother asked kindly.

  “Would you please tell my sister to keep out of my affairs? Forever?” Alice demanded. She made to go upstairs—there were other, far more important matters on her mind to sit in private and consider than this nonsense with boys.

  Her plans were derailed by a single mild, infinitely vexing statement from her mother.

  “She means well, you know that.”

  “But who does she mean well for?” Alice cried, whirling around. “She has set ideas in her head that will not be changed for anything despite the fact that the entire rest of the world doesn’t live in that same head, with that same head’s rules. What if I tried to introduce her to someone I thought would be a lovely boy? A painter, perhaps? Or a boatman?”

  “You would never do with a painter yourself, Alice,” her mother said with a mischievous smile. “You have more imagination and buoyancy than a hundred young artists. Now a boatman, who could take you on trips down countless sleepy rivers—and earn coin while he did—I could fair see that. Your father would be disappointed, of course, and worry about your financial future, but perhaps not if he could fish a bit from the prow.”

  “As long as I had a good, solid, loving husband, it wouldn’t matter?” Alice prodded, pretending she didn’t fully understand why this question was suddenly so important. “It wouldn’t matter at all who he was, or what he did? Or who his family was?”

&nb
sp; “Not at all. As long as you are happy, unlike your—” And here her mother’s eyes whisked away and back.

  “Unlike my aunt,” Alice finished softly. “She is happy, you know. And financially her future is fine.”

  “But what would you know about that? The finances, I mean, not the happy part,” her mother said quickly, not wanting to dwell on whatever unconventional things made her eternally single sister-in-law happy.

  “Oh, never mind. I’m exhausted from my present ‘buoyancy.’ Would you mind having Mrs. Anderbee bring me up some warm milk? I think I shall go to bed early tonight and miss supper.”

  “And also miss your sister at the table?” her mother asked archly.

  Alice pretended not to hear her.

  Twice she had actually gone to Wonderland and not just dreamed about it. But twice she had come out of Wonderland by waking. Perhaps sleep was merely the door, the way back in.

  She ripped off her many layers of clothes as fast as she could and donned her warmest, snuggliest chemise. She grabbed Dinah where the poor thing was just having a quiet lie on the windowsill in the sun and brought her into bed with her, tangled in with her own blond hair. Dinah didn’t resist and even curled around her head, purring into her ear.

  Mrs. Anderbee came up with the milk and a suspicious frown.

  “It’s no’ the right time for your flowers,” she said in her thick Northern accent. “Tha’d better not be getting ill.”

  “Thank you for keeping so close a track on my health,” Alice said with faint amusement, taking the milk. Flowers was such a lovely metaphor for it. “But I do definitely feel a bit of malaise.”

  “Girls today with their humors and mal-ays,” Mrs. Anderbee muttered. “In my day you strapped on what rags you needed to and got on with work. Farms wait for no swoonin’.”

  “Thank you, Mrs. Anderbee,” Alice said around a smile and a mouthful of milk. At least if you were outside leading a dray horse around a field, she thought, you wouldn’t need to worry about accidentally bleeding on a prized needlepoint cushion. The old servant showed herself out and closed the door as quietly as possible. She did care beneath her hard exterior. You just had to ignore what she said and pay attention to what she did.

  Warm milk down, Alice found herself sliding into sleep most delightfully, as if she hadn’t spent half the afternoon napping under a tree in a park.

  But of course she woke in Kexford.

  While Alice didn’t make it back to Wonderland that night, she had come very close; of that she was certain. There was a feeling of liminality when she awoke, like her dream-self had just touched whatever skin separated England from that other place.

  It’s very similar, she thought with a strange premonition, to an old person dreaming of youth. Not quite young again in reality, but near enough that upon waking there existed a certain confusion as to which version of age inhabited the current body.

  She had a nightmarish glimpse at the strange bodies of Wonderland creatures tumbling over each other as they fled the card soldiers. Beaks and tails and crazed inhuman golden eyes and people with strange hats. There was the smile of the Knave—ooh, how she wanted to slap it off him.

  There was blood dripping from roses. Not red paint.

  Also a glimpse of a placid castle in a remote valley that seemed important somehow. Did she know it? Was it familiar? What did it mean?

  If only she could have reached out and pressed through, somehow!

  “Oh, wake up, you lazy thing!” said a voice that wasn’t Alice’s. “You have been asleep for ten hours, easily! This is what comes of not having a real project or even a suitor or anything to occupy your time.”

  Alice kept her eyes closed, hoping the voice would go away, trying to keep the few moments she remembered distinct. The castle was important. The wounded, fleeing creatures were important.

  Everything was important except for that irritating voice calling her away from Wonderland.

  “Really! I’m talking to you, Alice. Open your eyes at once! I can tell you’re awake.”

  “Do shut up,” Alice told her sister as she scrunched down into the covers further and put a pillow over her head. Mathilda had to disappear. If Alice could just have a few moments to herself, maybe she could remember everything and figure out what it all meant. “You’re very rude to come in without knocking. I’m quite busy at the moment. Go away.”

  “I will not,” her sister said with some amusement.

  Alice opened one eye and saw the severely bonneted Mathilda regarding her with a raised eyebrow and almost a twinkle in her eye.

  “Please. Leave,” Alice said as seriously as she could. “I am trying to remember something very important and you’re making it impossible.”

  “What nonsense. Trying to remember a dream? That is not being busy. I must speak with you.”

  Alice took the pillow off her head and just looked at her sister, uncomprehending. There she was, utterly composed, utterly smug in her position, perching on the end of the bed. As if the only proper way the universe could run was when older sisters with ideas they thought were important could barge into rooms unasked, to wake up happily sleeping people, to correct them of their (presumed faulty) personal lives and routines.

  That was what really irked Alice about Mathilda, she suddenly realized. Besides the unasked-for lessons when she was younger, the unwanted introductions to terrible young men now that she was older, the constant and unrelenting sermonizing aloud of her beliefs and politics—besides these things, underneath it all was an unshakable smugness, an undefeatable certitude in all things she did. Which she did without hesitation or question. There was only one worldview possible, and it was Mathilda’s. It wasn’t even that she rejected other people’s beliefs; she literally didn’t see them.

  “You have two minutes,” Alice said levelly. “And if you ever so much as come into my room without asking again, you will wake up the next morning with a blancmange dripping down your face.”

  Mathilda’s brown eyes widened in extremely satisfying shock. “This is precisely the sort of thing that I wanted to discuss with you, Alice,” she said, a little more shrilly than she probably meant.

  (Another unbearably irksome thing was her constantly calm, patronizing tone. Her losing it was a little tick of winning in Alice’s game-board mind.)

  “You were exceedingly rude to my friend Mr. Coney yesterday.”

  “He was extremely rude!” Alice shot back. “He acted horribly—like an uncle or an older brother or zookeeper in charge of the Alice beast. He said some horrible, really filthy things to my friend Mr. Katz. And he did so first, I might add.”

  Mathilda was shocked into momentary silence. She had obviously not been told the whole story by whichever tattletale passed it on.

  But she did not question what Alice said.

  “Well, but Mr. Katz isn’t…known…to us…” she began instead, sounding apologetic. It was all too obvious what isn’t known really meant.

  “He could be a satyr or a demon and it still would behoove an Englishman to behave with a modicum of politeness if no insult to his person has been made,” Alice said frostily. “And as Mr. Katz is neither, but a barrister moreover, perhaps he even deserves a modicum of respect.”

  Mathilda sighed and then nodded, looking this way and that, almost nervous. She smoothed the front of her dress out. “You are right, of course. I just…Coney is a close friend of Corwin’s, and Gilbert Ramsbottom’s right-hand man.”

  Alice jumped a little at that: Mr. Headstrewth was Corwin to her sister now. That was a step!

  “He will have quite the political future, perhaps not as an actual elected official like Ramsbottom himself, but as a person more behind the scenes. An organizer, a doer. None of which matters, of course,” she added quickly, seeing the look in Alice’s eyes. “It’s just that he is making things a trifle difficult for Corwin right now because of your…interactions yesterday. It has put me in a very difficult position. Perhaps I never should hav
e introduced you the way I did, but now…He cannot seem to take a hint, or let you go—like a bulldog when its jaws are locked.”

  Alice wondered both at this strangely vivid metaphor from her otherwise dull and placid sister and the almost apology that came before it.

  “Corwin understands that you don’t want anything to do with Coney—I think a passing pigeon would notice that—but the man is his friend. Could you—I’m not asking you to see him as a favor to me, but could you perhaps…perhaps leave your relationship on less of a sour note than a literal door slammed in his face?”

  Alice wanted to scream. And not just because of the imposition she was being forced to endure—which was all a result of her sister’s initial nosiness. Silly Mathilda was wasting her time rambling on about boys and friendships and relationships and what was little more than gossip while an entire world was on the brink of some sort of disaster.

  While the fate of her friends was on the brink.

  Yet with the hours that had come and gone since she was expelled from Wonderland—even with the dream-reprieve of the past night—the urgency of the situation had lessened even further, at least emotionally. The feeling of desperation was fast becoming more like wishing to return to a book whose plot has just reached a climax when one is rudely torn away by workaday matters. The devout reader is anxious to return to those pages…but the need to do so is not felt as strongly as, say, the need to make sure there’s enough milk for the baby.

  When Alice focused back on her sister, she saw a fretful young woman who was worried about her relationship with her suitor—whom she obviously loved—and her friends. And she had basically just admitted it to her young, “silly” sister. She had admitted weakness.

  All of which was touching, but Alice still had to get her out of the room as quickly as possible.

  “Fineallrightwhatever,” she said grumpily. “I will speak to him one last—last—time with you and Corwin present. But no longtime commitments and nothing intimate like a carriage ride or dinner at the club. Also something that has a definite terminus.”