Best Intentions, Chapter Nine

[wanderamaranth]

 

“You must tell me, Mrs. Kingsleigh. We’ve had no word or letter, nothing to tell of Miss Kingsleigh's condition.”

While he'd told himself that he would wait, that he would not immediately charge over to Kingsleigh Manor and begin demanding answers, that was exactly what Hamish did after overhearing his mother and Mrs. Chattaway gossiping. Mrs. Kingsleigh, though, was decidedly tight-lipped with the answers Hamish requested, refusing to even allow him to see the young woman.

“Alice is fine, I told you, Hamish.”

“Then let me see her, Mrs. Kingsleigh, please.”

“I can’t!”

“Can't?” An echo of Penelope Chattaway's words resounded in his ear, and, taking a gamble, Hamish said, “Alice is not here, is she? Otherwise you'd say that you won't allow me to see her. Instead, you said that you can't.”

“Hamish, I--”

Hamish reached forward and took the tea cup from her shaking grasp. “Please, Mrs. Kingsleigh. You know I only have Alice’s best interests at heart...and yours, as well. I'm concerned, Mrs. Kingsleigh. This whole business with the orphanage...” He set the cup on the table and then took her hands in his, looking deeply into her watery eyes. “Where is Alice? If she were still at home no doubt she would have been cheering on your actions, but from the way you act...” He looked at her trembling shoulders and tightly-clasped lips as he said, “She hasn't done so. The only way Alice would not encourage such flouting of convention and scandalous behavior would be if she were not present. So I ask you again, Mrs. Kingsleigh: Where is Alice?”

“I can’t tell you, Hamish. You’ll never believe me. Maybe…years ago…you might have. Not now, though.” She sniffed, and Hamish could not recall her ever looking more miserable than she did right then.

Smiling, Hamish squeezed her hands briefly. “Try me, Mrs. Kingsleigh.”

“I…I sold her. I sold her away.”

Tilting his head to one side, Hamish said, not unkindly, “Mrs. Kingsleigh, you know that Father would never press Alice for more than she was capable of giving, nor will he force the issue of her contract whilst she is so ill.”

“I don’t mean to Rupert!” Helen angrily brushed away a stray tear. “I know your father is an honorable man, Hamish.”

“If you don’t mean to Father, than to whom—or what--are you referring?” Hamish asked, a sinking feeling in his stomach.

Suddenly hard, cold eyes met his. “I believe you know whom, Hamish, if you allow yourself to think on them.”

Letting go of the hand he still held, Hamish sat back, swallowing around the lump in his throat. “I’m afraid I don’t know what you mean, madam.”

“You do,” Helen hissed as she leaned forward. “Alice is no longer in London. She is no longer even in England, Hamish.” She hiccuped, and Hamish realized that it was the result of a repressed sob.

“She is...no longer in England?” Hamish parroted back, stunned. “Where is she? Who has taken Alice, Mrs. Kingsleigh?”

Looking him squarely in the eyes, Helen said, “The sidhe. The one as had marked her when she was young. She called him Hatter, and embraced him as a friend. He came to me, told me that her health would continue to suffer if he did not take her away. I...believed him. And so I let him take her.”

Hamish didn’t know what to think of Helen’s claims. The part of him that had been raised by his mother immediately balked at such notions, but a deeper part of him, the part that Alice had fed when they were children with stories and her giggling encouragements to Just imagine it, Hamish! stirred and whispered Maybe in his ear. He couldn’t, even though doing so would be what his mother and father would most certainly do, discount any of her claims at this point; she was the only one who had any clue of what might have happened, and he needed to sift through her ramblings to have any idea whatsoever where to begin looking.

“Say that the…sidhe…did come for Alice. Why would you allow him to take her?” Had she said something about it being for Alice's health? Hamish was beginning to wonder if he was having an episode of hysterical hearing; he'd heard of such cases before, where the listener only thinks they've heard something and....

Pressing her eyes tightly closed, Helen grimaced and said, “It was for her health. She is no longer like you and I, Hamish. Without the raths to sustain her, she’ll perish. He implied that she would be allowed to return when…but I am a fool to believe the promise of one of those creatures!”

“Helen, this is--”

“I know that you think me mad, Hamish.” Helen turned away from the young man, her lips compressed in a thin line. “How could you not? Even I think it sounds mad. Yet there is no other explanation, nothing else that makes a whit of sense!” Miserable, she continued, “She didn't wish to go with him. Despite the warm greeting she gave the beast, when it came down to it, she wished to stay home. I allowed that...Hatter to take her anyways.”

“Hatter?” Hamish stood from his chair, paced about the room twice, and then turned to Helen once more. “Are you certain she called him Hatter?”

“Yes, as certain as I can be.”

A memory flickered at the back of Hamish’s mind, of an Alice with bright eyes, in that time before she became ill as a child. She sat at his side while he reclined on the chaise, which had been carried to the apple orchard. Her hands had fluttered and she’d sighed dramatically as she sketched a story for him, with talking dormice and flying tea-trays and…

“She mentioned this Hatter to me.” Stunned, Hamish sank back down into his chair. This time it was Helen that stood, and she loomed over the ginger in his seat.

“What?”

Instead of answering, Hamish grunted in thought. “Yes, it must be. Alice was…telling the truth?” It was too incredible for Ermintrude Ascot’s son to comprehend, but Alice Kingsleigh’s childhood friend understood perfectly.

“Helen--” Hamish shocked himself with both his informality and temerity by standing again to grasp the older woman by the shoulders. “How do I get there?”

“Wh-what?”

“In the stories, the ones that Alice always told me, it’s possible to save someone from the fae. Stories that you originally told to her. You must know how one gets into the mounds. If rescues happened, they must have been able to get there in order to do the actual rescuing, yes?”

“Would you be willing to do that, Hamish? Are you really willing to go and fetch my Alice home?”

His mouth opened and closed. What madness was this? Were they were actually discussing...? Was he really going into a fairy mound and rescuing Alice from beings that, in all likelihood, did not even exist? His logical side failed in the mental struggle, though, because eventually he nodded. “I care for her, Mrs. Kingsleigh. That hasn’t changed simply because she refused my suit.”

Grateful seemed an inadequate word to describe how Helen gazed at him after that, yet it was the only one that Hamish could think of. “It would have been an honor to have a son-in-law such as you, Lord Ascot.”

Grinning, Hamish said, “Well, it may still be, at that, Mrs. Kingsleigh. If you will help me?”

“Of course,” she paused, then continued with, “There are only a few ways one can get to the land Under intentionally, from what I remember of my mother's tales. Mirrors are one way, and the least risky, aye, but they are rumored to be heavily guarded and warded against those of our world. Alice herself went there once by this method.”

“The others?” Hamish had pressed, a bit unnerved by her sudden Scottishness. He'd known, in a factual sort of way, that Helen Kingsleigh was not an Englishwoman born, but he'd always been able to forget that in the face of her graciousness and gentlewomanly behavior.

“Candle-light, if your horse be good and your spurs be bright, will take you there and back again,” she told him seriously, to which Hamish arched a brow.

“As I lack the ownership of shiny spurs, and possess even less faith in Babylonian candles, perhaps we should think of another method?”

“Blood,” Helen said bluntly. “Spilt on the standing stones, but that only works on the Fire Feasts, Beltane and Samhain…and Beltane be being months off, yet...”

“I do not know that I would be comfortable…offering a blood sacrifice, in any event,” Hamish said stiffly.

“There are only two other ways, and of those, only one is purposeful.” Her eyes were as large as an owl’s. “Tis very dangerous. Ye must go by their causeways.”

“Tell me how,” Hamish demanded.

*~*~*~*

Which is how he found himself to be sitting, fully clothed, in the Kingsleighs' cast-iron bathtub.

“Madam, I don’t really see…”

“Hush, now. I told you already, the tub will protect you as you travel their seas. Without the cold iron, they’ll attack you and you’ll never make it to the land Under.” She put another bucket full of water into the tub (and why she couldn’t just use the spigot, a perfectly good modern device if there ever was one, Hamish still didn’t understand, despite her explaining that to him as well), eyed the level, and then nodded with apparent satisfaction. “Aye, that’ll do. Now lean back.”

“Perhaps we should talk about this a bit more...” Hamish felt ridiculous. Here he was, a grown man, fully clothed in a bathtub, completely soaked, in the presence of a woman he thought of as a mother, and preparing to go off to fairy-land. If anyone had told him he’d be participating in anything of the sort even a month prior, he’d have called them barmy. “This is madness, Mrs. Kingsleigh!”

“Do not speak to me of madness, Hamish Ascot!” the Kingsleigh matriarch scowled. “I watched my daughter be taken by a creature that could not have been human and in a plume of smoke, too! You were there that day on the hilltop, those years ago! You saw the flowers crowning Alice's head. You heard them sing just as clearly as I did. Now you may be more comfortable living a life where you deny hard facts laid before you, but I am not the sort who will continue to deny strong evidence when it's presented before her! Do you love Alice, or no?”

“I...Mrs. Kingsleigh, that is...she....” Hamish stuttered, taken aback by Helen's blunt question.

“If you do, then you mustn’t back out now, wee Hamish.” Helen said, a maniac gleam in her eyes. “Remember what I said?” She shoved a spoonful of poppy syrup in his mouth. He suckled on it, broodingly, as Helen then proceeded to sprinkle thyme and apple rinds atop the water he sat in. She recited for him once again:

“I have to just shut my eyes

To go sailing through the skies

To go sailing far away

To the pleasant land of Play

To the fairy land afar...”¹

“If I only need to close my eyes, is the tub full of water really necessary, Mrs. Helen?” Hamish slurred, the poppy syrup quickly doing its work of relaxing him into re-assumed acquiescence.

“Just relax,” Helen chided, as she removed the spoon from his mouth. Handing him two bunches of lilacs, (and where Alice's mum managed to find lilacs at this time of year, Hamish was very curious to find out; they must have cost her a pretty penny) which he took with clammy hands, she filled the teaspoon with poppy syrup once again, and stuck it back in his mouth. Salt crunched under her feet as she shifted her weight. “Sleep now, wee Hamish.”

There was no help for it; he couldn’t not succumb to slumber. Hamish began to sink, but struggled to stay afloat, and was able to stay as such only under a great effort. “Mrs. Kingsleigh, you will not let me drown, will you?” he asked, eyes blurring.

She spoke, but Hamish could not understand her words; they sounded like they were coming from a long way off. Blinking hard, he tried to focus his eyesight, but couldn't.

Something else had to have been in that syrup, Hamish mused, and only felt a mild surge of concern over that thought. He held his head up as long as he could, but it was a losing struggle. Eventually he sank below the surface of the water, and he sucked in a mouthful of foul tasting water. He choked as an apple rind found its way into his mouth, tried to get up, failed, and then succumbed to darkness just as a woman's strong hands found the hair atop his head and began pulling him back to the surface.

“Hamish! Hamish, can ye hear me, lad?”

His eyes struggled open to the sight of Helen Kingsleigh, the entire front of her dress completely soaked through (enough so that he could count each stay in her corset, he noticed, and would have likely blushed if he'd been able, but he was too busy coughing up foul tasting water and fighting to keep his eyes open. It appeared he was on the floor next to the bathtub; he attempted to curl himself about it, but a strong hand on his shoulder forced him to stay laying flat.

“What was I thinking? What was I doing? Hamish!”

Warm hands wound into his hair, attempting to tug him back to reality. After a massive effort from both parties, he was forced to his feet and sent off to bed, Helen Kingsleigh's soft apologies ringing in his ears the entire way. She helped him change out of his sodden clothing (he would be embarrassed later, he knew, but right then he was simply so tired!) and tucked him into bed. A snuffling sigh, a luxurious stretch into the mattress, and Hamish fell into a deep sleep.

*~*~*~*

“I’ve had dreams like this before,” Hamish said. He’d woken up, dressed in a nightshirt, in his usual guestroom in the Kingsleigh residence--that was not so odd, nor dreamlike. No, it was when he’d stepped out into the hall that the oddness began. It was its usual wainscoted and wallpapered self, but as soon as the door shut behind him, the entry to his room completely disappeared. His fingers traced the wall desperately, looking for cracks, but finding none. Then he looked down the hall.

The now never-ending hall.

Turning to face the opposite direction, he started at the site of a glass table before him, bearing a small, clear bottle, beside an equally small key. Picking the bottle up, he read the tag. Drink me, it said, in delicate handwriting.

“I think not!” Hamish snorted. “Why, it could very well be poison!”

As he set the bottle back down, he noticed something he had not before, with the sudden appearance of the table distracting him. There were now two small doors set into the wall of the hall. One was in the base molding, and so tiny it would be best suited for a mouse. The other was in the upper part of the wall, where the wainscot ended and the wallpaper began. It was a rather traditional looking dumbwaiter.²

He swallowed and once again continued to consider the dumbwaiter in front of him. “When continuing to go left or right will fail you, where is there left to go?” he asked himself. “Up or down, that’s where,” he told himself, nodding firmly.

The handle was tiny, and made of brass. It slipped out of Hamish’s sweaty grasp twice, but on the third try, he was successful in turning the miniature knob. The door opened with a low creak, and there, sitting on the waiter’s tray, was the largest, hairiest, most ferocious looking weasel Hamish had ever seen. Neither a yelp nor a gasp was able to escape his throat; in fact, all of his muscles had bunched and tensed together. Hamish was hardly breathing, as he stared at the sharp claws, ruffled fur, and bright glint in the creature’s eyes. Then it grinned at him--a full, humongous, anatomically impossible grin, full of sharp, wickedly curved teeth.

“Up or Down?” the furry beast that was much too large to be a proper weasel asked.

“I…beg your pardon?” It was speaking. The giant weasel was speaking.

“’Tis a simple question, biped. Up or Down?”

“D-down,” Hamish said. The animal’s smile curled ever-wider.

“Excellent. Climb in, sir.”

It was awkward, and tight, but eventually Hamish was able to pull himself up and curl into a ball tight enough that he and his furry companion both fit.

“That was a decent suggestion, that I sit upon your lap,” the animal conceded begrudgingly (as when Hamish had first mentioned it may be necessary, he’d been set against it straight away) “but I am not a weasel!” (Hamish had been being careful not to call the animal a weasel, or so he thought, but it must have slipped out in the frustration of attempting to fold himself into the elevator’s shaft. )

“Well, what are you, then?” Hamish demanded, a bit belligerently.

“I, sir…” and here the beast tried to straighten itself up with pride, but there was simply no possible way for him to do so, on Hamish’s lap the way he was, so he settled for a stubborn tilt of his head, “am a Wolverine.” ³

“Is that not a type of weasel?” Hamish asked, suspiciously. He’d heard Lord Kinbote⁴ speaking of such creatures after his hunting trip to frozen Russia. From what he remembered, Kinbote had said that they were…

“Hrmf!” the Wolverine huffed. “I am nothing like my slithy cousins, I’ll have you know. If it will assist you in not speaking of me as such, you may call me by my proper name.”

Hamish waited for a beat of time, but when the Wolverine seemed unforthcoming, he prompted, “What is your name?”

“Well! How do you like that! Demanding an introduction, without bothering to introduce himself! Why, it’s the very height of Rudeness, that is!” Sniffing in an injured manner, the Wolverine finally said, “My name, sir, is Ferdinand. But--!” he hurried to add, “I prefer to be called Ferdie.”

“Ferdie,” Hamish repeated, in a stupefied stutter. “Hamish Ascot, at your service.”

“I don’t think so! I am rather at your service, am I not?”

“I…beg your pardon?”

“You’re the one that wished to use the lift, were you not? And I am the Lift Operator.” Reaching out a claw, Ferdinand casually swiped at the rope that supported the pulley behind them. Half of it sliced free, and the car they were in swayed alarmingly.

“What are you doing?” Hamish squealed, as the Wolverine swiped again.

“You did wish to go Down, did you not?” he paused long enough to ask. When Hamish stuttered out, “If that is what will take me to Underland…” Ferdie nodded, and finished his task. The rope fell away, and they were impossibly, briefly, suspended in the air, and then they began to plummet down.

Hamish could not help himself. He began to scream. Loudly.

“Oh, stop that wailing!” Ferdinand shouted over top his cries. “And enjoy the trip down. You won’t want to really start screaming until we hit the Sea of Tears.”

“The what--?” Hamish yelped.

“Oh, did I forget to mention that?” he responded casually, as the elevator continued to plummet downward. “Yes, we’ll get you to Underland. But we’re going to crash into the Sea. At least, I think we will.” Ferdinand did not sound particularly concerned if they did or not. “I’ve never actually gone Down before. Everyone else always wants to go up, see.” Still speaking in that cheerful, detached manner, he said, “Hold your breath now; it smells as though we’re getting close!”

There was no time for Hamish to draw a breath, though, for as soon as Ferdinand was done speaking, there was a great crash, and they were both tumbling outwards, into a great body of briny water. Hamish swallowed a mouthful, choked, tried to spit it out and ended up swallowing more.

What a great ending to my rescue of Alice, he thought in disgust, dying before the real adventure can begin by being unable to regulate my breathing! Distantly he heard Ferdinand shouting instructions at him, but there was naught for it. He helplessly swallowed another mouthful as blackness overtook his vision, and then he was aware of nothing more for a very long time.

*~*~*~*

The sunlight was blinding, even with his eyelids closed. With a groan wrenched from his lower belly, Hamish sat up, looked around, and stared. Spitting absently, what appeared to be a half-chewed sock covered in unappealing-looking purplish bits plopped out of his mouth and onto the sand. He hadn’t expected Helen’s half-pagan foolishness with the bathtub to work, and was therefore more than a bit dumbfounded that simply wishing himself to the faerie realm seemed to have actually do the trick. Yet here he was, on a beach, staring up at a sky that he’d never seen before. He could tell it was not the sky in, say, Cornwall, because there were birds in it that were chittering at him. Not a the normal chitter of birds in the sky, no…these birds were saying things he could understand.

“Look at that fellow! Half-drowned, he is!”

“Serves him right for gallivanting about in the Alice's Sea in his nightshirt, if you’re asking my opinion.”

“Good thing no one was, then, isn’t it?”

He gave a startled scream and struggled to stand upright on the sand of the beach. His previously fine woven nightshirt was soaked completely through, and when he landed on the beach, sand coated the fabric thoroughly. It would itch terribly in an hour or so as the nightshirt began to dry, between the sea water and sand, Hamish knew. He struggled for purchase, failed, and fell on his face with an inelegant splat.

A voice that sounded fatherly and friendly spoke to him from just above his shoulder. “You alright, ole chap?”

When he was able to flop around onto his back, he saw that the speaker was one of the seagulls that had been circling above him, one of the ones that he’d been hoping was a fevered hallucination. Hamish gave a girlish scream and scrambled for purchase in the sand. “You’re talking!” he squawked, stating the obvious.

“Well what would you have me do, boy? Meow?”

With a meeping sound that was embarrassing in the extreme, Hamish was finally able to pull himself upright. He took advantage of this by running as fast as his shaky legs would take him in the direction opposite the talking bird.

“Bipeds!” the seagull squawked after him, but let him go.

1From The Little Island, by Robert Louis Stevenson

2A small elevator used to transport food or other small items from one room or story of a house to another; they were typically set at waist level or higher in the wall.

3Wolverines, in some Native American mythology, are a Trickster animal, along with Raven and Rabbit. Tricksters are gods, animals, or spirits who flout the normal rules and/or conventional behavior in mischievous or “tricky” ways. Cheshire Cat is an excellent literary example of a Trickster.

4This is a double reference. The first, and more classic, would be to the character David Kinbote in Vladimir Nabokov's novel Pale Fire. The second, and the source I originally learned and/or “borrowed” the name from is X-Files episode 3.20: From Outer Space, written by Darin Morgan. That particular episode's theme was, in spirit, the same as Nabokov's novel—that reality is shaped by our perceptions of it. Morgan named an “alien” after Nabokov's character for this episode.

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